


How to Lose an Edward in 10 Days

by thebriars



Category: Victoria (TV)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Peel is a wonky dude, Pining, Some angst, based off a 2000s rom com, jumps of logic bc its a 2000s rom com, overuse of italics and metaphorical cinnamon, sex happens but very much off screen no worries, so much pining istg, well maybe worries if that's what you're looking for, ya know the crewwwww
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2019-10-02 13:57:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 36,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17265431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebriars/pseuds/thebriars
Summary: Alfred Paget, journalist and throw pillow connoisseur, is inspired by his roommate's inability to keep a boyfriend and his terrifying boss's completely adverse opinion on a political column in her magazine to write a groundbreaking how-to article. Across the hall, Edward Drummond is finally getting a leg up in the world of politics, if only he can get his own quirky boss to sprinkle in a little more experience to his resume.(yeah just google the plot of "how to lose a guy in 10 days". except i heavily deviate.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i've been really sick and am also being haunted by a random movie from 2003 i watched in june when it was still on netflix and therefore took the next logical step of turning it into a drumfred au

_Alfred Paget, Senior Journalist, The Buckingham_

_How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days_

_I’ve always been one to fall in love, losing myself in the moment and trading hearts easily. Of course, not everyone is so quick to commit. Due to the nature of many relationships and the many buckets of ice cream we all go through after a rough breakup, a spark of curiosity begins to grow in many minds. What causes this? Though ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ is the classic trope, it seems that things may be more complicated than it seems._

_I set out to discover the answers ten days ago, but not everything is as it seems._

_So, here’s the ultimate tutorial for how to lose a guy in ten days._

•••

 

“I really, really can’t believe it,” Mina sniffled, pressing her face harder against Alfred’s shoulder. “I thought we were really getting somewhere, you know? I think I love him, Alfred.”

He sighed. Post-breakup Mina never got any easier to deal with. “I’m sure you didn’t, Mina, but that doesn’t make it better.”

Mina barked a short, harsh laugh. “Not in the slightest.”

Alfred cautiously patted her back and made something between a shush and a cringe that made Mina bark a sob-tinged laugh.

“God, you’re really _bad_ at this.  Where’s Harriet? She knows what she’s doing.”

“Sorry about my lackluster abilities. I think Harriet’s at work already.” He noticed Mina’s shaking shoulders and decided to forego his snarky tone. He tilted his friend’s chin up to meet his eyes and gave a halfhearted, sad smile. “Just, seriously, do you actually love him?”

Alfred reached down to hold her hands and Mina scrunched her nose. “Not really, I suppose.”

“See? Look, you hooked up a few times and he ended it. You’re fine, and it’s something we all go through.”

“But not you. Or Harriet, or Victoria, or Ernst or Albert or anyone!” Mina plopped down onto the couch again and sobbed. “Anyone else besides _me_ , apparently. Me and my shitty, shitty relationships!”

Alfred ran a hand over her hair and fumbled for words to appease her without being harsh. “Mina, maybe you just have bad luck.”

It was clearly the wrong choice, as Mina sat straight up and tossed a cheap IKEA throw pillow in his general direction, mascara beginning to smear under her eyes.

“No one has luck as bad as mine! Besides, you and the rest of them are _attractive_ and have interesting personalities, and last I checked I have neither.” Mina dropped her head onto the back of the couch and pushed tears from the corners of her eyes as Alfred cautiously sat down beside her, genuinely concerned for the first time. Mina’s dramatic breakups where practically monthly tradition.

“That’s not true in the slightest. Do you remember Charles?”

“The one who wanted to be a priest? Yeah,” Mina snorted.

“Then you remember him dumping me.”

Mina turned further into the sofa and let her silence answer Alfred’s question. It had been a messy one, with a liberal amount of shouting and some generally nasty remarks. Alfred had resigned himself to a life of single-ness afterwards and it had taken a solid few months of regular rounds of encouragement from his friends to go out on a date again.

With a breath of relief as Mina came back to her senses, Alfred offered a tissue and patted her shoulder. “We have work.”

“Fuck work.”

“If only, Mina; if only.”

 

Harriet looked stunning, as always, in some fancy black pantsuit that Alfred didn’t recognize, coffee mug in hand and some poor, terrified intern at her heels.

“Good morning, Alfred, Mina. The Duchess has called a meeting at ten, so be prepared.”

“Did she say anything about my email?” Alfred asked, anxiously clicking a pen as he refreshed his inbox. Mina hopped up onto his desk and slapped her hand on his to prevent another refresh.

Harriet shrugged. “Sorry, but no.”

“Dammit,” Alfred groaned. “It’s been two days and I really need an answer before we start writing and-.”

“Alfred,” Harriet interrupted, “I’m sure she’s going to get to it. And if not, Victoria will paraphrase her thoughts into something for you and you’ll get your answer.”

“God, Harriet, must you always be so logical?”

“It’s my one flaw,” she said flippantly, offering her coffee to Mina, who gladly took a sip.

“Harriet, do you have any advice for our dear Mina?”

“I’ve been dumped. Again.”

As Harriet took a minute to fuss over Mina, Alfred let his eyes wander over the room, catching Victoria hauling around a giant binder filled with past issues, Nancy and Charles flirting (again) over the coffee pot, Albert half asleep at his desk, and Cleary hurrying around with stacks of papers. Ernst waggled his eyebrows over his computer and Alfred stuck his tongue out in response, gladly sinking back into the lull of the office after a long weekend of dealing with his plethora of brothers.

“…and then he told me that it wasn’t going to work out, and I’m sitting there in my underwear and I’m thinking _what the fuck_ , and then he just kinda left?” Mina shook her head heavily and finished off Harriet’s coffee. 

“Oh, Mina, I’m sorry,” Harriet said, rubbing her hand along Mina’s arm. “That’s never easy.”

Alfred smiled to himself and continued to refresh his inbox, lost in the chatter of his coworkers and the faint sounds of Mozart coming from the Duchess’s office.

 

“Ms. Scott?”

The Duchess was an imposing woman, despite her age and her small stature, and the second her watery blue eyes turned to bore through Alfred, he regretted calling her name.

She smiled tersely and for a moment, she looked less like a paper-thin old woman and more like the biting reporter she was rumored to have been. “Mr. Paget. I was most curious about the contents of your email.”

Taken aback for a moment, Alfred swallowed hard. “Yes, ma’am. Do you have any thoughts on what I said?” The Duchess raised a brow and he gulped again. “Ma’am?”

“A political column? In the Buckingham? Mr. Paget, I would have hoped you knew what this magazine was about already.” The Duchess snapped her fingers at a passing intern. “Earl Grey, no sugar.”

Alfred, having difficulty keeping up with Duchess’s powerful strides (Nancy theorized she was an immortal Greek goddess), began to launch into his own explanation. “I know, but I just thought that some people would like a little bit of commentary, especially for those who don’t pay much attention to the news, but need information about the current political climate, and-.”

They ground to a halt in the middle of the hallway, Harriet passing with Ernst and a new cup of coffee.

“Mr. Paget,” she said snidely, a simpering smile that reminded Alfred of the face his grandmother used to make when he asked a stupid question as a boy souring her face, “the Buckingham is a _lifestyle_ magazine. Stick to your column, and don’t test my patience.”

“But, Ms. Scott, politics are lifestyle nowadays, and I really think that I could do better than _how to_.” Alfred hoped his sly puppy eye trick was working.

The Duchess scrunched her nose in either disdain or appraisal, before sighing and continuing on her walk. “Write me the best article I’ve seen yet for this month’s issue, and I may reconsider.” She strode off, grabbing her tea from the shaking intern, leaving Alfred in her wake.

 

“And, then, I was thinking of doing a fall special about Halloween around the globe?” Mina glanced up to see the room’s reaction, and Alfred nudged her from his spot on the sofa.

 _“Confidence, Mina,”_ he whispered.

The Duchess looked up from her tea with an unreadable expression, which Mina took as reassurance. She settled back against Alfred’s legs and Albert took the floor to talk about numbers that Alfred didn’t care about.

His phone pinged in his pocket.

 

 **MINA:** do you think I’m clingy?

 

Alfred sighed.

 

 **ALFRED:** not at all

 **ALFRED:** still stuck on him?

 **MINA:** pfft what do you think

 **ALFRED:** oml its not your fault

 

A strong elbow from Harriet alerted Alfred to his own turn to speak.

“I, uh, I was thinking about writing an article about… how to…”

He glanced down at Mina’s phone screen, where she was scrolling through a list of common mistakes people make in relationships. _Bam._

“Something about mistakes people make when dating! How to keep a guy.”

The Duchess raised a spindly eyebrow. “Test them.”

“What?”

“Test your list. How can you get someone to dump you?”

Alfred paused. “How to _lose_ a guy.”

“Spice it up a little. How to lose a guy in… ten days.”

A small smile was growing on the Duchess’s face, which was actually quite horrifying, but Alfred hazarded a smile back. “How to lose a guy in ten days.”

 

It was a tantalizing concept. Alfred had been friends with Mina long enough to know all the horrible ways relationships could go downhill, and yet he had never known someone to actively try to lose a boyfriend.

How would he even start it? Finding a boyfriend wouldn’t be hard, but being consciously horrible to someone would be a long and painful process. What tactics would work? He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. At least he had a lot of rom-coms to watch and old relationships to filter through.

“How to _lose_ a guy? God, it’s genius! You’re a genius, Alfred. This is going to be your big break- I can feel it.”

There was a small crowd drawn around Alfred and Mina’s desk island, mostly due to the unholy noises Alfred was making in his frustration.

Alfred barked a laugh. “But I didn’t even come up with it. The Duchess did, which puts about a thousand tons of pressure on my back. Mina, what did I get myself into?” He dropped his head dangerously close to his keyboard and groaned. “I don’t want to date someone I don’t like, and I don’t want to try and lose someone I do.”

“Ah, the things we do for these jobs,” Ernst said, shaking his head wistfully as Harriet scoffed at them both.

“Alfred, it’ll be fine. If you actually like the guy, you can always fake it.”

“But I can’t, because this has to be the best thing I’ve ever written. It has to be good, really good, and it has to be honest.”

“I guess the first thing to do is find a boyfriend.” Ernst winked saucily and Alfred chucked a pen at him.

“But you do. Boyfriend hunting commences this evening at Ciro’s, six o’clock,” Harriet said.

Victoria, passing in a flurry of rosemary perfume and fingers flying over her phone’s keyboard, paused to level a glare over Mina’s shoulder. “Alfred, if you don’t come, I will hunt you down and personally drag you to the restaurant and pick someone for you, and you do not want that.”

“I’ll be there, promise.” Alfred held out a pinky and pushed his bottom lip out in a pout. Victoria smiled despite her sigh and hooked her finger around his.

The die was cast.

 

•••

 

Once again, Edward found himself spending most of the day at the coffee pot, trying to keep up with Peel’s endless caffeine craving. It didn’t help that the pot was ancient and constantly malfunctioning and that Florence’s desk was dangerously close to it. Edward figured that the universe must be against him, for why else would everything be going so horribly wrong? He felt more like an intern than a private secretary, he’d just ended a messy engagement, and his boss was quite possibly losing his mind.

“Morning, Edward,” Florence said, cheery in a way that felt false and made Edward’s skin crawl with guilt.

“Good morning,” he managed, accidentally splashing some scalding coffee on his hand and cursing. Of course.

Loud laughter from the Buckingham offices just across the hall echoed again through the break room, which only made Edward hate his own lot more. It was always painfully quiet, and his cautious walk through the hall with a dangerously full mug of steaming coffee always seemed worse when none of his coworkers found it funny. It was torture to pretend he didn’t see their judgmental looks. Edward needed a promotion. Hell, he needed five raises and new coworkers.

Nudging Peel’s door open with his hip to avoid dribbling coffee on the carpet, Edward felt silly beyond belief, especially when he noticed Melbourne sitting in the guest chair across from Peel. There was a moment of horrible eye contact before Edward set the mug down carefully, subtly straightened his tie, and ducked from the room. A flush grew into his cheeks and the look Melbourne’s own secretary gave him from the sofa in the waiting room was crippling.

Of course he had to run into the politics editor, and of course there were a few dark splotches of coffee on his shirt cuffs. Edward sighed.

The other secretary masked a smile behind his hand, and for a brief moment, Edward considered dashing out of the Westminster offices altogether and never coming back. Maybe he’d go back to Scotland and become a farmer or a shepherd and spend all of eternity trying to find God in the empty eyes of his sheep.

He shook himself and gave the other man a look of ‘ah, bosses’, which he didn’t seem to appreciate, and promptly dropped like a sad, angry stone onto the armchair opposite.

Edward felt like he was stuck between having too many passions and dreams to give up now and not giving enough of a shit to carry on in his modern office hamster wheel. Losing his job would surely be a death sentence equivalent in the London political sphere, for despite Peel’s relative chivalry, there was nothing keeping his rabid coworkers from tearing apart his reputation. He was another figurine in an intense game of Sorry with about fifty dream-drunk peers hot on his tail, just itching to knock him off the board.

The door to Peel’s office opened and Melbourne stepped out, beckoning for his secretary to join him. Edward slumped into the armchair and scuffed his toe against the bristled carpet.

“Drummond?” Peel stuck his head out from around the edge of the door, and Edward jumped to attention.

“Sir?”

Peel glanced over his shoulder, as if for reassurance, and then leveled Edward with a determined look. “A position on Mr. Melbourne’s reporting team has opened up, and he’d like to ask you to take the post.”

Edward felt his jaw hit the floor and scrambled to gather it up again. “Sir, I- that’s the field crew, right? And why me? Why not someone who’s an actual reporter?” He immediately regretted shooting so many point-blank questions, but Melbourne (who had apparently appeared in the doorway at some point during Edward’s fumbling) didn’t look particularly fazed.

“Yes, field work. And you’re excellently qualified.” Melbourne took his jacket from his secretary, causing Peel to look sufficiently awed, and made his way down the hall, Edward hurrying in his wake. “Anyway, Edgar and I have a meeting to get to, but think on it and shoot me an email sometime in the next week or so. Edgar, you have my briefcase?”

Edward nodded furiously, too excited to be embarrassed for himself, and slowed to a stop at the end of the hall as Melbourne and Edgar strode out to the main corridor. Peel came up behind him, nearly to the bottom of his coffee, and laughed.

“You’re in for a treat. But you don’t have much reporting experience, do you?”

His heart sank. “No, not really. But-.”

“Well, write me a report, then, Get someone to fall in love with you in the next ten days or something, and draw it up nice and professional and I can add in some experience to your resume. You’re a good man, Drummond. Here.”

Peel pressed the coffee mug into Edward’s chest and grinned wildly. Edward smiled back carefully, mind buzzing, and nodded as Peel waltzed off towards his office again.

A report on something and some added spice to his application. Edward didn’t really like the backhanded card dealing, really, but a job for Melbourne was a dream come true. It was as if the next rung on the ladder had been pulled down by about a mile, and he could finally step up on to it.

So, Edward could ignore his guilt. But what to write?

He had a sneaking suspicion that Peel hadn’t been offhandedly stringing words together earlier. Peel, as loopy as he was, was a man of specificity, and he never asked Edward to do something with loose ends.

Edward sank against the wall, staring down into the coffee mug, hoping it held the answers, and resigned himself to charming someone within the next week or so.

Guess he had better get started.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welp
> 
> huge fuckin shoutout to my amazing beta, otter/clarameansbright, for reminding me that lose only has one o and for texting about hot women at midnight
> 
> idk leave a comment?


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> eek sorry this is kinda late- finals are kicking my ass and i need elon musk to invent time travel so i can go kill freud and avoid this hot mess express psych essay riiiiiip. 
> 
> i'm planning to prewrite this as much as possible over the weekend so i can update more frequently ;P

_If, for some horrible reason, you too are looking to get dumped, there are several ways to go about shoving your partner in the right direction._

 

•••

 

“How many fries do you think I can get without looking insane?”

Harriet raised her eyebrows, incredulous, and Mina shrugged.

“What? I want a lot of fries.”

Alfred closed the office door behind him and bounced vigorously on the sidewalk for a minute while Harriet tapped out an email and Mina wrung her hands.

“But seriously, how many fries?”

“However many fries you want, darling,” Harriet said offhandedly. “Alfred, are you free on… Tuesday? Two p.m.?”

He stuttered a groan and stopped jumping. “Oh, God, if it’s a board meeting, then no. I’m avoiding the Duchess for the next month, at least.”

“Real mature, Paget.”

“No, that’s totally understandable,” Mina said.

Alfred joined in on Mina’s hand-wringing party. “What if she asks me about the article? I think I’d die.”

“I’d probably die, too. Secondhand death.” Mina jerked her thumb in Alfred’s general direction with a distant look of terror. It seemed that Harriet and Victoria were the only people in the office who weren’t perpetually fearful of being squashed beneath the Duchess’s Louboutin heel. Alfred and Ernst had once started a small, underground mail chain listing the Duchess-related fears of various employees so they could serve as a vague defense system for each other.

“I’m gonna grab a taxi,” Mina sighed.

“I already called an Uber, actually. He’ll be here in three minutes and forty-seven seconds. And the Uber driver is also the intern.”

Alfred paused, the hum of the city fading momentarily as the silhouette of a man on the third floor passed by in the glass front.

“Wait, what? Which intern? There’s like, fifty of them.”

He was slim, tall, and clearly wearing a smart suit, and Alfred knew that if he met him, he would remember him.

“Small… brown hair…”

So, someone he had never met. Someone who looked handsome and successful and if only Alfred was looking for a _real_ boyfriend.

“Not helpful, actually. They all look like that- Alfred?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming,” he called, dragging his eyes away from the window and stumbling towards the Uber. Sure enough, it was Harriet’s favorite intern, Brodie, looking extremely uncomfortable and twitching his fingers against the steering wheel.

Mina tugged Alfred into the middle seat and pulled his head down to whisper into his ear.

“Okay, but how many fries?”

“ _God_ , Mina.”

 

Ciro’s smelled like the ass end of a cigarette and salt, all gloriously rolled together into a neon haze and sticky table tops. Mina munched on an obnoxiously large plate of fries with satisfaction and halfheartedly fought off Alfred’s attempts to steal them.

“Harriet, this is a real missed opportunity. We could have gone to a nice place and eaten fancy oysters on the company card.”

“That’s not how the company card works, Alf-.”

“Shh, Mina, I’m dreaming.” Alfred stole a few more fries and Harriet motioned for Mina to hand her one, which she did. Harriet skillfully managed to take a sip of her lime water (the waiter had cringed) while digging a sleek Moleskine notebook out of her purse.

“So, how many steps?”

Alfred bypassed the straw in his glass to take a hefty swig of his milkshake and started chewing on his nails.

Mina shrugged. “Five, maybe? Nice, even number. Cooling off periods between them all.”

“That’s five torturous things, though.”

Harriet stopped her habitual pen-clicking to sigh. “Alfred, you’re a perfectly good writer. You could just tell the guy you’re going to do the stuff and no one will be the wiser.”

“But then how will I know if it’s actually going to make a guy dump me?”

“This is just kinda sad,” Mina said around a mouthful of fries. Alfred kept a watchful eye on Harriet’s fresh notebook page and reached over to feel around for the last couple fries, despite Mina batting at his fingers.

Harriet reached across the table and stole the final fry from Alfred’s hand, grinning as he flipped her off. Mina scowled and stole some of Alfred’s milkshake in retribution.

Alfred took a deep breath and carefully took Harriet’s notebook and pen away, scribbling across the title line. “I’m thinking I should start with being picky. Like, I’m vegan and gluten free _and_ keto and so we have to go to this weird, hipster restaurant. Or something.”

Mina frowned. “I don’t think you can be all of those at the same time.”

“Actually, I think you can,” Harriet mused.

“That’s horrifying.”

Alfred rubbed at his eyes. “Guys, is that a good idea or not?”

Mina pulled Alfred into her side for a hug. “Sorry, Alf. I know you’re stressed.”

Alfred shrugged. “Yeah. I just feel weird about you guys helping me so much in the first place.”

Harriet smiled softly, poking at Alfred’s cheek with her pen. “Hey, it’s fine. We want to be in on the drama and I’m guessing Mina probably doesn’t want her roommate to explode. And, for the record, I don’t want you to either.”

Alfred huffed a laugh. “Thanks, I guess.”

“I definitely don’t want you to explode. Look- if I didn’t love you so much, I wouldn’t let you steal my fries.”

“Alright, no exploding. But picky? Is that good?”

“I like it. Very annoying. Pescatarian is pretentious.”

“Thanks, Harriet,” Mina laughed.

Alfred clapped decisively and gave Harriet the rest of his milkshake (lime water only did so much). “Four to go.”

 

Mina fell asleep about half way through the evening, head pillowed on Alfred’s jacket, tucked away into the curve of the booth. Harriet doodled aimlessly through the margins, trails of flowers and shapes tracing her train of thought.

“I think we’re good.”

Harriet groaned. “We better be. That was too much negotiation for something as… easy.”

“It’s not going to be easy for me,” Alfred muttered. Harriet rolled her eyes, playing with the lime rind on her napkin.

“Lists should be easy.”

“Not everything is a list, though.”

“Shh, stop being logical. That’s my job.”

Alfred kicked at her knee under the table and reached over to brush some of Mina’s hair away from her face. Things had picked up a little, customers chatting at a couple other booths on the back wall and a respectable crowd gathered at the bar, though Ciro’s remained a definitive hole-in-the-wall. It had been Alfred and Harriet’s hideaway during Uni, the perfect place to escape from work for a moment and breathe. It was sufficiently far away from campus for the chance of seeing any unsavory classmates to be slim. The fries were the best in town and the whole place reminded Harriet of a sleepy dive bar from one the Northwest-grunge TV shows she liked, so Alfred ended up there frequently, despite his original misgivings. Alfred thought it smelled funny in the back corner, but it quickly became a gathering point for the brothers and Victoria, too. Someone could be found in the corner booth most Friday nights, but once Mina and Alfred moved to the other end of the neighborhood, the Ciro’s tradition fizzled out. Victoria got a taste for avocado toast and the break room at Buckingham’s became the most common haunt. Still, Alfred couldn’t bring himself to completely forget about Ciro’s, especially after remembering how heavenly the fries were.

He sighed and dropped his head onto his arm. Harriet’s pen slowed and jumped out to tap at his forehead. “You good there?”

“Thinking about my victim.”

“Maybe if you stopped calling him your victim, you’d feel better.”

“What, you got a better word?”

Harriet scoffed. “Yeah. Give me a minute.”

Alfred rolled his head into his shirt and groaned, still twisting his finger’s in Mina’s hair. The wood smelled like beer and stuck to his palm and Alfred turned his head back towards the open café, watching the people at the bar scramble around each other like ants trying to get into the mound. Harriet muttered to herself, a perpetual walking thesaurus, and Alfred flicked his eyes to the front door.

A figure stood in the entryway, pausing to check something on his phone, and Alfred got a tingling suspicion that it was the same man as the silhouette he had seen earlier. Harriet slowed her muttering to follow Alfred’s wide-eyed gaze, stopping altogether at the sight of the man.

“You’re seeing this, right?” Alfred whispered, because the guy was _beautiful_.

He was the epitome of the tall, dark stranger, all chestnut curls and soaring cheekbones. Alfred gulped and sent Harriet a panicked look that loosely translated to _oh, God, help me_.

Harriet wriggled in the booth, slapping in the general direction of Mina’s boots and scribbling a line through the added step of _find a boyfriend_. “He’s your guy. Mina, wake up, things are getting interesting.”

 

•••

 

Peel insisted on clearing out the entire office at half past four, leaving Edward scrambling to handle arranging the cancellations of several meetings as well as being delegated to find a working coffee machine in the black hole of a supply closet. Florence had sent him nasty looks from over her desktop while Edward fiddled around at the coffee pot.

While Peel herded everyone out, Edward stayed behind to lock up and catch his breath.

A promotion? Working with Melbourne? He could finally be done with the blasted coffee pot, done with Florence’s side eyes, and done with Peel’s oddities. He would be out of the office, rushing around the city, notebook in hand like he’d envisioned as a teenager. He’d write his name under the headlines and snap pictures and hold up microphones and shout questions and _God_ it would be so _cool_.

But for the time being, he was plopped on the floor by the coffee pot, rigid carpet beneath his fingers, thankful that he’d finally yanked the cord enough for the wires to realign for long enough to be violently duct taped into place.

Maybe he’d win his coworkers favor in the last hour with his coffee pot skills. Still, with only ten days to go, slipping into their gossipy social circle seemed less important than it ever had before. Florence could glare daggers all she wanted, and nothing would change.

He’d done it.

Edward laughed to himself and ran a hand over his face, grinning like a fool at the coffee pot. “I _did_ it.”

 

After a good, long pacing session in front of the big windows at the front of the office, Edward mused over the headlines on the bus home and crashed through his apartment building.

He still had at least four unread emails from Florence’s family to sift through, a series of unanswered texts from his sister, and a love story to write.

He sighed, curled into the corner of his couch, and hovered over the reply button on his email app. It seemed unfair to pursue someone so soon after ending his engagement. He’d flicked over email after email from her father, her brother, her sister, her cousin, her mother… part of him wanted to feel bad, and the other was too excited for newfound freedom to care. Either way, it was weird to romance a guy (yeah, a guy; that sounded nice) within a month. But, knowing Peel, it needed to be real, at least to an extent. He’d need a rock solid alibi, and wouldn’t it just be easier to do it right the first time at that point?

Edward kicked at the scuffed edge of his coffee table and glanced out to the neon _CIRO’S_  through his window.

Ciro’s was just across the road from his flat, and really, a drink sounded like the perfect way to finish off his rollercoaster of a workday.

A beer did sound good.

 

The prickling sensation of eyes on the back of his neck itched at Edward while he nursed a beer and stared into the white void of his empty Word Doc, praying to the gods that his report would write itself. He was struck with the absurdity of it all- writing a report on romance? For his boss?

Edward shook his head and pressed on the ‘a’ key for a few seconds until a couple lines had been filled with his inner monologue, scuffing his toe against the base of the table.

Eyes prickled on his skin again and he rubbed at the nape of his neck with his knuckles, tempted to turn and see who was staring so intently at him. It’s not that Edward was unfamiliar with the feeling, but rather that he was suddenly invested in anyone who might be doing the staring at all.

Ten days.

He turned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading and, if you so choose *wink wink*, commenting! 
> 
> as always, big thanks to my beta, otter/clarameansbright, for briefing me on the english readings i never do and for giving me such excellent critique.
> 
> anywayyyyyyyyY hmu on tumblr @thebriars to yell about gay shit and history


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow i guess i update on thursdays now?
> 
> i'm prewriting a lot of this during the long weekend (woo america), so they'll probably start coming out a lot faster. finals were messy but now i have the time to just sit down and write some good drumfred so yayyy
> 
> also i highkey want to do a rewrite of season 4 just because i have ANGER

_Of course, the first step in any romantic venture is to find a willing participant. Whether you scout out prospective partners via modern online shortcuts or in the traditional way, make sure you find someone you actually enjoy. Unless you’re looking for a one night stand, connecting with someone on a general basis other than instant attraction is of utmost importance._

_Unless you’re me, of course._

•••

 

On the eve of Edward’s thirteenth birthday, he kissed a boy in the shade of the woodshed in his backyard. His name had been Peter and he had had hair of gold, loose and curled against his forehead. Edward had felt rather like a prince then, lips pressed hesitantly to Peter’s, hand cautiously cupping his cheek. Peter tasted like the cinnamon bread they had stolen from Edward’s mother’s birthday baking and though Edward wanted to melt into the space between them, his fingers dug in the soft earth by Peter’s hip, holding him still.

He pulled away too quickly and Peter had blinked in a flash of hurt, but as young boys so often do, they pushed it aside and pressed their backs against the cool wall behind them. Edward closed his eyes and curled his toes, bringing himself back down to reality. Peter had made a noise between a laugh and a cough, teetering on the edge of desperate, and Edward stared into the moor beyond.

If someone had come around the corner then- his mother looking for her lost cinnamon bread, his father trudging around in search of a particular wildflower, a neighbor hoping to race each other on the low plateau above- two boys, lips brushing, fingers barely touching… what would they have said?

He pushed the cinnamon taste of Peter into a deep corner of his mind, pushed the glimmer of his golden curls into a dark box in a dark room, alone and far away.

He had time, and he’d find a girl he liked someday, and he’d probably turn into a copy of his father, picking wildflowers on the edge of the moor in his free time and kissing his cinnamon wife goodbye every morning on his way to a cookie cutter job in a cookie cutter life.

Edward gulped and Peter slunk away into the fading pastel sky, footsteps scuffing across the grass. His palm stung where he had dug his nails into his skin, the other hand still latched in the dirt.

 

He met Florence at a high end social, champagne flute nearly slipping through his fingers while his father charmed the room with stories of his “mischievous” boyhood Edward knew were false. Sometimes he didn’t recognize his father when he flipped like that, slick and tricky in a way he never was at home. Hell, Edward hardly recognized himself, curls combed harshly back on his scalp, suit jacket pulled flat against his chest. He watched the boy in the bathroom mirror copy his movements and hoped it was just the drink he’d downed earlier playing with him.

The soap smelled like coconut and the white towels were so neatly pressed and folded that he hardly dared dry his hands. The soles of his shoes squeaked against the stone floors as his father less-than inconspicuously shoved him in Florence’s direction.

She was pretty, no doubt, with soft curls and curves and round cheekbones, but Edward didn’t feel anything but the tightness in his chest at the idea of romancing her. It was a cold, biting sister to the heat he felt when he snuck glances at boys at school, and Edward wondered which one was supposed to be love.

He extended a hand as a classical waltz began to echo across the room, feeling curious eyes on his face and back and hand as Florence took it, cool green eyes glimmering in the golden light. A couple delighted whispers flitted through the partygoers, tittering about young love and other bullshit, and as he guided Florence out into the crowd of dancers.

His hand took her waist and her lips quirked in a small painted smile, and as the pace picked up, Edward wondered just exactly what the boy in the suit was getting himself into.

 

The eyes were a startling sapphire and belonged to a man with golden hair, arms folded on the table, a smile twitching on his face. Edward inhaled sharply and straightened his shoulders, glancing over towards the rowdy bar crowd and then down at the floor, hoping his sudden flustered demeanor looked more like flirting than what it really was- Edward, in his too-big jacket and unwashed hair, playing a game he would never understand.

Edward wasn’t much of a flirter. He’d started dating Florence at seventeen, gun at his back, and now he was twenty-six, horrendously inexperienced and, admittedly, desperate. And Blondie looked like the sort of person Edward could romance. He was beautiful, with creases at the corners of his mouth that hinted at a perpetual crooked smirk, and he’d be damned if that wasn’t his type. Still, approaching someone wasn’t his forte, never had been, really, and he was sat with at least one, maybe two, girls, which was far too intimidating.

He closed out of Word and tucked his laptop away, settling into the corner of the booth with his legs tucked up so he could read and (hopefully) look appealing.

Ciro’s was exactly the sort of place Florence would have hated. His shoes stuck to the floor a little and the tables were tacky with grease. It smelled like salt and the air was thick with the pressed-in heat of a crowd. The lighting was dim and yellow, rather unflattering, he supposed, and the one time he’d tried to drag Florence off to some hole-in-the-wall place, she’d sat uncomfortably, hands tucked under legs while Edward mused over his regrets.

He shook his head, trying to bring himself back down to the booth and the boy off in the corner and the deleted, empty Word Doc in his laptop trash.

“Wilde, right?”

Edward jerked his head up, face now dangerously close to Blondie’s, which was really quite nice up close. “What?”

“You’re reading Wilde. At least, I think.”

Edward huffed a laugh. “Yeah, Wilde. I’ve been told it’s basically the gay guy constitution, so I grabbed a copy and… well, here I am.”

Blondie chuckled and reached over the seat back to ruffle through the pages, tracing his finger down the creased spine. Something in him turned over at the sight, something deep in his gut, and when Blondie yanked his hand back to slip into the bench opposite, the something pouted.

“I’m Alfred,” he said, kicking his legs up onto the table.

Edward was glad the lighting would hide the flush that rose to the tops of his cheeks, shoving Wilde into his bag and trying to look somewhat functional, commanding himself to focus on the words Alfred _(Alfred!)_ was saying rather than the tantalizing glow of his blue, blue eyes. “Edward. So, you, uh, come here often?”

Alfred laughed. “Is that an actual question or a pick-up line?”

“Both,” Edward supplied, a grin spreading across his lips.

It seemed Alfred appreciated the honesty and the sentiment, as he muffled yet another chuckle into the heel of his palm. “I do, actually. Or, I used to. Old college haunt.” He bit into the side of his thumb and glanced up under his lashes and Edward nearly choked. “Why do you ask?”

“The bartender didn’t yell at you when you put your feet up.”

“Are you familiar with the bartenders of this… fine establishment?”

“I live just across the street,” Edward said, jerking his thumb towards the front windows. “They have good stuff and it’s easier to work when there’s white noise.”

“Really? My office never shuts up. I can’t do anything until they clear out for lunch.” Alfred leaned forward, making to take a sip of Edward’s drink, eyebrows raised.

Edward nodded, trying not to stare as Alfred kept burning eye contact while he sipped. “Where do you work?”

“I write for The Buckingham.”

 _Perfect, or terrible?_ If it went badly, avoiding him was going to be hard, for even though he knew he’d never run across Alfred before, he’d probably be everywhere now. “Really? I’m over at Westminster.”

“Politics? Lucky,” Alfred sighed. “My boss is going to kill me if I try and instate a political column again.”

“Fight her, then,” Edward suggested, knowing he was making the right choices when Alfred laughed again and flicked his indigo eyes up to Edward’s again.

“I wish. I think all of the senior journalists are going to revolt if she shuts me down again.”

“What would you write about?”

“Gay shit, man. And serious stuff.”

The something fist pumped, for every lingering doubt that Alfred was doing anything but flirting had dissipated. Things were falling into place, glorious and horribly painful, for guilt was beginning to eat at Edward’s gut at the idea of using Alfred for his own gain, no matter how truthful his feelings were.

“Gay shit, huh? Me too.”

Alfred shot him a winning smile, dropping his feet off the table and leaning forward across the table. “Excellent.”

 

•••

 

Mina threw him an incredulous look as he and Edward left, Harriet nodding in approval. He screwed up his nose in their direction while Edward popped the collar of his coat and bent his nose into its warmth. Alfred felt like he was slowly melting, every little thing Edward did entrancing and endearing and beautiful.

And really, he was. His eyes shone a deep brown, nearly black sometimes, flecked with gold in the center. High cheekbones and a strong jaw- everything Alfred would want in a guy.

If only things were different. If only Alfred could just take him on a date without ulterior motives or possible consequences.

The horrible realization that Edward might actually _dump_ him was creeping up under his skin, itching as they made their way across the street to Edward’s place. He shook himself and darted forward to slip his hand into Edward’s coat pocket, delighting in his instant recognition, fingers curling around the other’s.

“So, what’s the plan?” he said, leaning up to surpass the wind, knowing full well how his breath was flitting across the sensitive spot beneath Edward’s ear.

“The plan is whatever happens.”

“Perfect,” Alfred said with satisfaction. Edward was getting better and better every second, and he really, really wished he could just _tell_ him what was in store. Well, what he hoped was in store. Maybe Edward just wanted a night together. (On a Monday? Unlikely, but Alfred had done it before. Several times, actually. Mina had lectured him about it.) Of course, maybe that was better, for clinging on to an obvious one night stand was something that never turned out good.

What if Alfred turned it into a one night stand and _then_ hung on? He wasn’t going to kid himself and say that giving up within the hour was sane, but it also sounded anything but terrible.

He almost tripped while stepping up the curb, but Edward’s strong hands caught him neatly, and _good God_ was Alfred mad about him already.

“You good there?”

“Yes, thanks to you,” he said, pushing his hip against Edward’s (as best he could- the man was quite tall). Edward gave him an exaggerated bow. “How chivalrous,” Alfred chuckled.

“At your service.”

They took the stairs two at a time, Edward fumbling for his keys and Alfred pausing to admire the view of Soho from the landings. The neighborhood glimmered Oxford blue and faded red in the night, the CIRO’S sign across the way flickering a little. He saw Harriet and Mina standing just outside, waiting for yet another intern Uber driver. Traffic was slowing a bit, and the notoriously crowded club down the street looked fairly quiet. Monday, after all.

Edward’s flat was small and cozy, papers and heavy books and chewed-up pens strewn across the coffee table, a small stack of dishes in the sink, and neatly framed pictures on the wall. Edward as a boy, knees bandaged, freckles and a worn jumper, halfway up a tree with what looked to be his sister not far behind. Edward as a teenager with a couple of friends sat on the hood of a beat-up station wagon, Edward and his sister with his parents at a wedding, Edward and his sister at the Arc de Triomphe…

Alfred paused in the hall to look them over while Edward tossed his bag over the back of a kitchen chair, backlit in Ciro’s dusty crimson, the window at the end of his living room darkened and vast.

“So,” he said, hands burrowed in his pockets in a sudden awkward pause.

“So.” Alfred moved into the living room to face him, trying to seem confident while his heart crumpled in on itself. Edward smiled a little and extended a hand.

Alfred took it gladly and pulled them together, a hand snaking up to cup the back of Edward’s neck, glad he at least got to romance someone he actually liked, and rose onto his toes to reach Edward’s lips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *insert SEX vine here*
> 
> huge shoutout to oswinpnxd on tumblr for making that victoria as vines video because i really fuckin needed that in my life. 
> 
> the biggest of big shououts to otter/clarameansbright for beta-ing this chapter, talking about mud orgasms with me via google docs, and letting me freak out about specific shades of blue. you're the best my gal
> 
> ummmmmmmmm thank you for reading and also i'm a hoe for comments *wink wink*


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so im an actual idiot and forgot to do the little snippets of alfred's article at the beginning of every chapter?? anyway i added those back they're not important but they're there now
> 
> also
> 
> episode 2???!?!?

_Step One: Overstay Your Welcome_

_The first, most obvious, and often overlooked step in a relationship is knowing the path it’s going to take. Is it a hit-and-run sort of deal? A fling? The opening to a real relationship?_

_If you think you can read the situation, make a quick decision on your course of action. Trust your gut and leave before they wake up, stick around for breakfast and nothing else, get their number, make plans… there are many choices, and making the one that seems the least likely to cause friction._

_So, in my case, I did the exact opposite._

•••

 

Edward’s sheets smelled like vanilla and moving from them seemed like a sin.

There was a hand on his hip and soft breath against the crown of his head, the tiniest bit of violet and yellow peaking from between the blinds. And it was _Tuesday_ , for fuck’s sake.

Alfred had to get home and get to work by eight, and the clock on Edward’s nightstand was aggressively blinking six forty-two.

He cursed under his breath and considered his options. Catch a bus back home- twenty minutes if traffic wasn’t totally hellish- throw on clothes, dash to Buckingham’s offices, and be late nonetheless. Or, change up the list a little. Pull a Mina and outstay his welcome, maybe even make Edward late…

No. They’d decided that they couldn’t do anything to seriously mess with the guy, and since it was Edward, (beautiful, brilliant Edward), Alfred wasn’t going to do anything horrible.

He smiled at the idea of waltzing into Buckingham twenty minutes late, smirking as he made his excuses. He was working on the Duchess’s project, really, so he had every reason to cite sleeping with a guy as the cause for his tardiness. It was more than likely that Harriet and Mina had already told the entire office anyway, so he might not even need to grovel at Victoria’s feet for clemency.

Twenty minutes less at work? He’d take it any day.

Before he could ponder anything more, Edward’s alarm began to blare and Alfred quickly shut his eyes, curling deeper into the mattress.

 _“Fuck,”_ Edward muttered, and Alfred bit back a grin. Good God, he was absolutely adorable.

Sheets shifted and the hand on his hip disappeared, leaving cold air in its place. Edward struggled up onto his forearm, his eyes burning across Alfred’s skin. He kept his eyes closed, hands curled up by his mouth to disguise his soft smile. Mina had told him once that she always pretended to be asleep when her flings woke up, as if it might encourage them to stick around.

Mina’s love life really was quite sad.

Edward sighed, running a hand down from Alfred’s shoulder to his waist, and he tried not to squirm beneath the touch.

“Alfred?” he whispered, soft and low. Alfred could feel Edward’s frown when he stayed quiet, burrowing into the pillow. “Alfred, hey, I have to go soon.”

The warm feeling that had settled in his chest the night before curled tight and Alfred let his brow furrow a little.

Edward hummed and dropped a kiss to the spot beneath Alfred’s ear, and he couldn’t help the little gasp that followed.

“You awake?” Edward asked, voice husky and tingling against Alfred’s neck.

“No,” he said, blinking up to meet Edward’s eyes, and _holy shit_ was he beautiful in the light. Rose-tinged cheeks and messy curls and eyes that glowed copper as the sun began to rise a little higher, bathing the bed in gold.

“Hi,” Edward said, breaking into a grin, and Alfred flipped onto his back to pull him down for a deep kiss.

 

Edward had left to shower, leaving Alfred alone in the sheets, suddenly cold without a body against his back. He found his phone in the pocket of his jeans, tossed haphazardly beside the bedside table next to his shirt. He frowned at his low battery and the flurry of texts lighting up the screen.

 

9:23 PM

 

 **HARRIET:** are you sleeping with him?

 **HARRIET:** omg Alfred you’re totally sleeping with him

 **HARRIET:** okay use protection

 

9:24 PM

 

 **MINA:** harriet is grinning at her phone a lot are you srsly sending her memes while youre at some guys house

 **MINA:** oh wait

 **MINA:** WAIT

 

10:56 PM:

 

 **HARRIET:** do you want me to send intern uber driver to pick you up

 **HARRIET:** Alfred?

 **HARRIET:** you know by sleeping with him I meant sex not spending the night

 

11:08 PM

 

 **MINA:** ALFRED ARE YOU HAVING SEX

 **MINA:** ALFRED

 **MINA:** ALFRED WHAT

 

11:17 PM

 

 **HARRIET:** either youre murdered and in a ditch somewhere or you will be in the morning bc I think mina is going to kill you if you don’t show up soon

 **HARRIET:** okay what do you want me to put on your grave either way

 

1:15 AM

 

 **VICTORIA:** Harriet says you’re doing the do in the name of Buckingham and I’d like to thank you

 

1:22 AM

 

 **MINA:** istg text me back Alfred I’m gonna kill you

 

Alfred ran a hand over his face and sighed, trying to smother his smile at the increasingly violent (and more and more plausible) threats. The faint sounds of the shower and slow traffic below blurred into the back of his mind as he flicked through a couple more messages from Mina, guilt bubbling in his stomach at the idea of leaving them wondering as to his whereabouts.

 

6:54 AM

 

 **ALFRED:** hey mina sorry I freaked you out last night

 **ALFRED:** and yes we had sex you doofus

 

Mina shot back almost instantly.

 

 **MINA:** oh my god I’m going to murder you

 **MINA:** Alfred I’m actually going to scream

 **MINA:** holy shitttttttttttTTT

 **ALFRED:** I’m really really really sorry

 

 **HARRIET:** mina is yelling so I’m assuming youre okay

 **HARRIET:** for now lol

 **ALFRED:** yeah thanks for telling the whole office I slept with someone

 **HARRIET:** ok I only told Victoria

 **ALFRED:** oh I’m gonna be late for work so don’t wait for me

 **HARRIET:** damn dude you’re really just going all out

 **HARRIET:** midlife crisis?

 **ALFRED:** I don’t think you can have a midlife crisis at 25 but sure

 **ALFRED:** no I’m actually just going to be overstaying my welcome

 **HARRIET:** ahhh mina style

 **HARRIET:** ok I’ll let Victoria know its for your project

 **ALFRED:** if you tell Ernst about this I will get mina to kill you for me

 **ALFRED:** also why are you at our apartment?

 **ALFRED:** or can you really just hear mina from upstairs

 **HARRIET:** no I’m on your couch. shes not that loud I promise

 

Alfred grinned and tucked his phone under the pillow as the shower turned off, curling up under the comforter and closing his eyes again.

Soft footsteps came into the room and paused by the door, then making for wardrobe. Alfred peeked out from under his lashes, nearly choking at the sight of Edward in a towel, trails of water running down the dip of his spine and pooling in the hollow of his collar bones.

Edward flicked his gaze to the bed, and Alfred threw him a smirk, delighting in the flush that rose to his cheeks. Those childhood freckles were still there, smattered lightly across the bridge of Edward’s nose.

His eyes went a shade darker and Alfred bit his bottom lip.

Maybe Edward _would_ be late for work.

 

•••

 

He told Peel that his bus had gotten stuck in traffic, feeling curious and questioning eyes on his back as he made his excuses, as if they could all tell what had really happened. Edward avoided Florence in particular and disappeared into his dingy little office off of Peel’s as soon as he could, dropping heavily into his squeaky old roller chair.

It was the fact that he didn’t even mind that bothered him- like some wave of obnoxious indifference had overtaken him since the meeting with Melbourne. He and Alfred had destroyed all the hard work of his shower within half an hour before catching a bus and darting off in their separate directions, half of Alfred’s outfit pieced together from Edward’s drawers.

And he hadn’t even gotten his fucking _number_.

Edward ran a hand over his face and halfheartedly skimmed his email, answering a few questions and arranging a few meetings. Nothing out of the ordinary and nothing interesting.

He sank back into fleeting memories of last night, reveling in the ghostly impressions of hands and lips and fluttering lashes. Alfred really was something else altogether, all energy and creativity and sunshine bundled tight into a man who was, quite frankly, gorgeous.

Edward grinned to himself and let his mind drift into daydream, imagining lazy summer days on the knolls behind his house, hours drenched in warmth and brilliant blue skies. He pictured adventure, maybe dragging Alfred through the Parisian streets he knew so well, getting lost in the scents of bakeries and the shadows of history. 

Or maybe something simpler- a real date, somewhere a little nicer than Ciro’s, where Edward could use the cufflinks Josephine kept sending him for Christmas.

Josephine would like Alfred, he thought, which brought him spiraling back into a hazy, undefined vision of the future, where his sister and his boyfriend could be friends and his parents were happy for him and other unlikely things. Josephine, as daring as she was, would be nervous to go behind their backs like that.

Edward sighed. He’d spent one night with Alfred and he was already planning ahead, too far ahead. He always did this. He always let his expectations get the better of him, and it never turned out the way he wanted it to.

Maybe it was his inexperience that led him down such fantastical paths, the idea of a life where he could just do things he wanted to do for once too wonderful to ignore, or maybe he really did feel things for Alfred. Either way, it didn’t really matter, because Edward had ten days for feelings to happen (on both ends, too- how frightening), and he wasn’t really doing anything to encourage that.

A knock on his door startled him from his beautiful reverie and he jerked to attention, pushing his chair a few inches over so he could reach the door handle.

Florence stood awkwardly, face set carefully, as if she had been planning her expression for hours. Edward gulped and tried a small smile.

“You wouldn’t happen to have found that necklace of mine, would you?”

“Ah, no, sorry- I’ll keep looking.”

She nodded and turned to go, her back far too stiff and straight, and Edward crumpled a little. He didn’t hate her, not at all. It was kind of impossible to _not_ like someone he had spent years upon years with, no matter how formal and unfeeling their courtship had been.

The whirlwind after that first dance had been far too strong for Edward, young and confused and ever so willing to bend to his father’s wishes. His father had changed since he was a child, turning from the man with wildflowers and soft smiles into the cliché business mogul villain in every environmental awareness movie, turning into someone paper thin and tired at home. Edward’s fear of becoming him had morphed into something akin to hatred, hatred of the man he saw at parties, romancing and dealing and negotiating, never quite stopping to see past the shimmering exterior of it all. And still, he longed to please, longed to prove himself, like he was still trying to make up for Peter and the boys he’d smiled at too much in school. Hatred dimmed in the face of guilt, it would seem.

So, he courted Florence throughout the rest of school and then through uni and afterwards, weekly meetings and an eventual proposal shaping the odd thing between them into something tangible to the rest of the world. Love, his mother would say, and Edward would nod.

_Sure. Love._

And then Peter was dead and Edward tasted cinnamon in the back of his throat and the way he held Florence’s hand seemed horribly unfair to them both.

He reached out to catch her hand again there, though, feeling her fingers tighten against her soft palm, but she stopped.

“What?”

“Florence, I’m sorry. For lying to you in the first place and then for being so… callous about ending it.”

She narrowed her eyes and worked her jaw for a moment. “You kind of ruined everything, you know.”

“I know,” he said, but the tightness in her hand loosened anyway and she glanced around quickly before stepping into his office, shutting the door behind her.

“Look-,” Edward started, ready to lay it all plain, but Florence cut him off.

“I’m sorry, too, for reacting so badly, but that doesn’t mean I’m not mad at you,” she said, smiling tersely as Edward swallowed. “I’ve known you for so long, but now I feel like I’m talking to a stranger.”

“I wasn’t ever myself with you.”

“I can tell.” She blinked then, clearly pushing back tears, and looked around the office, as if she was searching for the right thing to say, hoping for writing on the wall.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Edward said quietly. “I know what you mean.” Sometimes he wished he didn’t know her as well as he did, but in some strange, shattered way, he did. It was as if he watched her through a glass wall, just slightly distorted, just out of reach. And yet as she stood there, the glass seemed to fade away, thinning and thinning until Edward could see her clearly.

Florence smiled again and dropped his hand, nodding a goodbye and slipping out into the hall again, leaving Edward to stare at the space she left in his tiny office, the click of the door echoing softly through his mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welp 
> 
> i have a couple more chapters prewritten and i'll get them up within the next week or so? maybe? idk shits crazy man
> 
> hugs to otter/clarameansbright for giving me a bite of cake today. you da real slim shady
> 
> anyway thank you for reading!! this fandom gives me LIFE


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i can't stand making alfred be an absolute dick to edward, so i think this is going to turn into "alfred does unintentionally endearing shit and edward squees a lot while dealing with his tragic backstory" and i'm v cool with that
> 
> also i was going to post this like 2 days ago and that just... didn't happen. update schedules and me do not mesh i guess lol

_Step Two: Be Invasive_

_Any sane person should know better than to launch right into someone’s personal life, but even more so their public one. Everyone does a quick Google search to check where they work, but showing up or contacting them there takes the snooping straight to stalking._

_Of course, that means I had to do exactly that._

•••

 

Ernst was staring intently from over the top of his desktop, trying to puzzle out exactly why Alfred looked so smug. He threw him a joking glare and Alfred shrugged while Mina snorted into her coffee. Victoria shook her head, perched on Alfred’s desk.

“He’s going to figure out sometime.”

“Well, no one’s going to be telling him, that’s for sure,” Alfred muttered, flicking his gaze pointedly towards Harriet’s desk. She caught his stare and raised her hands in surrender.

He began clicking aimlessly through the prototype cover designs Harriet had sent out, trying to distract himself from the unsettled itch in his gut.

Victoria chewed the inside of her cheek and picked at the eraser of one of Alfred’s pencils, drumming her nails against the handle of her coffee mug. “The Duchess isn’t happy with you. Being late, I mean.”

“I figured,” Mina said, turning back to her planner and pointedly ignoring Ernst’s distant puppy eyes.

Alfred went an interesting shade of white and went to check his inbox (passive aggressive emails were the Duchess’s preferred mode of warfare), but nothing new blinked at the top. Victoria chuckled.

“Not _mad_ , really, but annoyed.”

“Since she can fire me, it’s really all the same.”

Victoria rolled her eyes while Mina hummed in resignation, having discussed the dangerous nuances of the Duchess’s mood before. “She’s not going to fire you, I promise. She thinks you’re too interesting.”

“That’s completely unhelpful!”

She sighed and flicked at his shoulder. “You worry too much.”

“I feel like you’re just telling me all this to freak me out,” Alfred said. Victoria flashed him a wicked grin and hopped off the desk, leaving Alfred to gasp dramatically while Mina cackled.

“She’s incorrigible,” Alfred grumbled, tapping his pen against his notepad. He’d crossed _overstay your welcome_ off the list, somewhat hesitantly, as Edward had seemed perfectly happy to be a little late if it meant… well.

Mina had pulled enough confusing articles about obscure diets from untrustworthy blogs for Alfred to realize that it was completely implausible for him to find a restaurant willing to serve him, so _picky first date_ was in the bin. But what else? Edward was really far too wonderful for Alfred to stomach doing anything remotely douchebag-ish towards him.

He sighed and tipped his head back in his chair, staring up at the exposed metal rafters. “Mina, what do you do when you meet a guy you like?”

“Huh?”

Alfred sat up and leveled her with a stare as serious as he could make it. “The last guy. Liam.”

“Louis, actually-.”

“What did you do with him?”

Mina scrunched up her nose and poked halfheartedly at her coffee cup with a pencil. “Christ, you make it sound like I hid his body somewhere.”

“Are you saying you _didn’t_ do that?”

She stuck out her tongue and kicked at his feet from under their desk. “I don’t make a habit of murdering men I like. You’re the exception. And I don’t really know- we slept together, obviously, and then I left my bracelet on ‘accident’.”

Alfred grinned. “Perfect. What if I just slowly started moving my stuff into his apartment?”

Mina tilted her head and studied his face, looking for true motives. “You really like him, don’t you?”

“He’s not horrible, Mina,” he said. “Actually, he’s the opposite of horrible.”

“I’m glad you like him, but that’s also terrible. And you only have nine days left, so don’t go slow. Text him and ask if you can see him again.”

Alfred blanched. _Shit._

Mina frowned. “You _do_ have his number, right?”

“I’ll be right back.”

 

Westminster Politics’ offices were supremely depressing. Bland grays and the monotonous soundtrack of clacking keyboards, the mechanical sway of one of those little smiling flowers, the scent of cleaning spray… Alfred tried to hide his frown, pressing the back of his hand to his face.

A girl with tired eyes stared at him blankly. “You said Edward?”

“Uh, yes. I, er, don’t know his last name.”

Something akin to a smile twitched at her lips, and she leaned over to lift the phone off its hook. Alfred breathed a small sigh of relief. He could handle this. He was confident, usually, and Victoria liked to drag him to PR shit because of his ‘natural ease’. Talking to Edward after showing up at his office out of the blue was easy.

The receptionist dropped the phone back down and Alfred stepped back to hover by the entrance, anxious shivers racing up and down his spine.

Edward appeared moments later, and he really did look amazing in a button-down, curls tragically smoothed over, completely unsuspecting. A twinge of guilt hit him then, for having your one night stand show up at your office in the middle of the day would have to be the most horrible thing. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“Alfred?”

“Hi,” he said sheepishly. The receptionist coughed a little, somewhere between uncomfortable and utterly delighted, and Alfred’s cheeks burned.

But he had a political column to write.

Edward looked completely nonplussed, and Alfred utilized the moment of recognition to don a brilliant smile and waltzed up to him. He used to hope his confident façade wasn’t as transparent as it felt, but he’d had enough experience to know exactly when it was sculpted right. A distant piece of him recognized it as sad.

“I wasn’t expecting to see you here,” Edward said, somewhere between surprised and nervous. Alfred felt a little sick, because he could _see_ the receptionist memorizing their every move, her eyes flicking rather gleefully between them.

He squared his shoulders and looked up at Edward in a way he knew drove guys crazy. “I never got your number.”

“Oh, yeah, I suppose so-.”

“Or your last name.”

Edward blinked. “Drummond.”

Alfred let out a chuckle that was partway acting and partway real delight at Edward’s full name, a knowledge that was oddly satisfying. “Well then, Mr. Drummond, what _would_ your number be?”

 

Later, slumped over the remnants of lunch, Alfred grumbled woefully into Harriet’s shoulder.

“I don’t think he wants anything more from me. You should’ve seen his face, Harriet, when I came in. He looked scared, almost.”

Mina hummed sympathetically and rubbed a circle into his arm. Harriet frowned and scuffed her heels against the tile.

“Can I say _oof_ to that?”

Alfred laughed somewhat hysterically. “Yeah. Oof. And I just feel terrible, because I _have_ to write this article and it’s too late for me to choose anyone else. And I really like him! And I feel shitty for acting so goddamn stuck up around him.”

“Listen, Alf, you’re gonna be fine. Finish out the next few things and type it all up for the rough draft so Victoria and I don’t have to get on your ass about it, and then explain everything and get your man back.”

“Oh God, please don’t call him that.”

Harriet snorted and glanced up as Ernst stopped through to dig his lunch out of the fridge. Alfred hadn’t heard any whisperings about the pair lately, which was off in and of itself, but as he tracked the cool stare between them, he couldn’t help but figure things had ended badly. Harriet never talked about Ernst.

Mina tapped against the table and jerked her head to the clock over the door. “Break’s almost over.”

Alfred made an inhuman noise and forced himself to stand, a burning weight in his limbs since his adventure to Westminster making him absurdly sluggish. “I guess I’ll text him after work.”

“Now,” Harriet said, and Alfred groaned. “You have to be obnoxious. Sorry.”

“You’re right. I’ll text in ten minutes.”

 

•••

 

_Step Three: Text Too Much_

_Everyone’s heard of the texting parameters: replying within seconds is weird, sending the first text too soon is also weird, and a thousand others. The number of ‘y’s you put in ‘hey’, whether or not you capitalize or use punctuation, and how liberal you are with emojis all turn into an intricate and subtle message to the person on the receiving end._

_Though these unspoken rules seem silly and restrictive, we all know the heart-in-throat feeling of hitting send. The tone you set at the beginning can make or break a relationship. As you can probably expect, I set the worst tone possible._

 

•••

 

 **ALFRED:** hey!! it’s alfred

 **ALFRED:** sorry for showing up at your office, but our boss was out at a meeting and i had to make a run for it :p

 

Alfred was the most mystifying person Edward had ever met.

Despite his sweetness, both in person and through text, he’d pulled approximately three dick moves in the last twenty-four hours. Admittedly, Edward had been a willing contributor to his own lateness, but showing up at his office was weird, no matter his reasonable explanation. And it had only been forty-five minutes since they’d exchanged numbers. Alfred seemed like the kind of guy to plan every move, to dance between coyness and forwardness, and yet there he was, texting well within the ‘wow, that’s awkward’ time span.

Edward dropped his temple against the cool glass of the cab window, Peel muttering and glaring at the notes he’d taken during the meeting with Palmerston in the seat beside him.

At least Alfred seemed more than willing to fall in love with him.

Peel turned to him, a glimmer of joy in his eyes. “You finish that report yet?”

“It’s not even been a day,” Edward said, laughing uncomfortably and scratching at the nape of his neck. He could never tell whether Peel was cracking a joke or being dead serious.

“A fine young man like you? Shouldn’t be a problem.”

“I, uh-.”

Peel guffawed then, shaking his head a little and slapping Edward’s shoulder. “I’m just pulling your leg. I expect it by next Thursday, though. We’re meeting with Melbourne on Friday and I suppose you’ll want to hand in your application then.”

“Oh- yeah, sure, um-,” Edward stuttered, pointedly ignoring the cab driver’s curious look in the rearview. He _really_ needed to get that field work position. 

 

Josephine called in that night, all pixelated smiles and exciting news. Edward propped his phone on the kitchen counter while he tackled the dishes he’d piled up over the last few days.

“… and it really wasn’t a surprise. We all _knew_ he was going to be fired- I mean, he had to be the absolute worst teacher to ever grace this city- but his expression was hilarious! Edward, you really need to come visit.”

He shook his head and laughed lightly, elbow-deep in sudsy dish water. “I wish, but I don’t have the time. Peel keeps me running all over the city or shut up in my office with a month’s worth of paperwork. He still hasn’t figured out how to decipher expense reports.”

Josephine snorted, as she did every time he brought up Peel around her. “That man. I’ll never understand why you’re still working for him.”

“Well, not for long, hopefully.”

“Ooh, that’s new! Do explain.”

“Tell me about everything in New Orleans first, though. You haven’t talked about anything but that dick-ish teacher for weeks.”

“Nothing new. The kids still think it’s funny that a Scottish girl is teaching them French, but that’s old news…”

Edward scrubbed at a particularly stubborn pan, settling into the familiarity of Josephine’s chatter. He missed her, really, but she was going to come home over Christmas. Edward hoped he could use a new position to stay back in London instead of trekking all the way up to Melrose, for Josephine was going to be staying over for a few nights anyway and avoiding his family was always ideal.

Josephine pattered out and sighed as Edward studied the inside of a pot. “It’s clean, Edward. Now tell me about this change in careers.”

“Nothing that drastic,” he snorted. “Just a step in the right direction.”

Her unsatisfied stare prompted Edward to drop the last plate into the drying rack rather more forcefully than necessary, psyching himself up for a winded explanation and the million questions sure to follow.

“Melbourne- he runs the actual reporting- has an opening in his field staff. So, like, running around with a notebook and a microphone and a camera.”

Josephine whistled and bent down to pull a ridiculously fuzzy cat off the floor. “Take it.”

“I’m trying to, but I really only have experience in economic stuff. Peel’s willing to sprinkle in some reporting stuff to my resume if I write him something.”

“That poor man’s going to die without you, Ed.”

“I’ll never fail to be surprised by his complete ignorance towards all economics. He’s been running the branch for, like, ten years.” Edward moved the phone onto his cluttered coffee table, starting to page through scattered papers and books. He really did need to start using folders or something.

“Well, anyway, what’re you writing him?”

Edward glanced upwards to reassurance and took a deep breath. “This is the weird part. He wants me to write a report about- ugh- getting someone to fall in love with me.”

Josephine choked on her tea. _“What?”_

“I have to make someone fall in love with me in ten days, and write it all up, too.”

With a great shout of laughter, she fell over sideways onto her couch, clasping her hands over her mouth. “You can’t be serious!”

“Dead. I slept with- with someone last night to get a head start.”

The noise Josephine made was inhuman and the cat jumped up onto her chest to make sure she wasn’t dying. “You, sleeping with somebody? Breaking up with Florence has really changed you.”

Edward shrugged. “Not really. I just get to do what I want now.”

Josephine caught her breath and struggled up, still wheezing. “I guess that’s good. Oh, how are things with Florence? And you have to tell me everything about this _person_ , now.”

“Fine, fine. Well, we met at Ciro’s- that place across the street you like so much…”

 

Later that night, long after Josephine had hung up to leave for dinner with some friends, Edward buried his nose in the sheets and searched for the leftovers of Alfred’s cologne.

A horrible sinister feeling had settled in his bones, itching there, some permanent instinctual alarm that made him anxious. At least Florence was somewhat sorted out- he _had_ rather made a mess of everything. Ending it in front of her family was quite the opposite of what he intended to do, but the way her father was looking at him, like some winning point in an intense game of social chess, had made him so unbearably infuriated. Everything had just spilled out. Quick, biting words between him and Florence in the shadows of the entryway had turned into full-out argument with her father, and then Florence was at his apartment with boxes and a friend to help her pack it all up. Things had seemed far too simple- a few words, and it was over. Everything he’d been struggling to say for years forged into a sharp blade to cut the ties between them, and then she was gone.

Maybe it was the fact that it didn’t bother him that bothered him. Florence had lived with him for _years_. As soon as they were done with Uni, they’d bounced between cheap places before settling in Soho, landed jobs in the same office. Everything fell into their unsettlingly perfect places, and Edward could feel himself start to shrivel up under his chiseled exterior.

God, he didn’t even know Florence. For all the effort he put into maintaining a polished relationship, he felt like he had hardly dated her at all. They were friends, sure, but nothing more, not in the practice of it. Edward might as well have slept beside a ghost.

And still, he felt bad- bad for embarrassing her in front of her parents, bad for leaving things so rough and sharp, bad for never loving her in the first place. It had helped to move- out of that crisp, clean modern place on Broadwick Street and into something he could call his own. It had helped to talk to her at last, clear the air a little.

Edward sighed and curled his fingers into the pillow, grasping at air.

Alfred was weird. He’d replied to the text Edward shot him on the bus ride home within minutes, not to mention _showing up at his office_ , and Edward wasn’t so dumbfounded by the man that he didn’t notice the false face he put on. And yet, he was endearing. He was beautiful and kissed spectacularly and funny and smart, knew Wilde by heart, and smiled at Edward like he was watching a masterpiece unfold before him.

Twenty-four hours and Edward was head-over-heels, starry-eyed, whipped- all of it, all for a man he knew should technically annoy him.

In any other circumstance, he should have felt terrible. He’d broken off a rather serious engagement just a month before, he was practically locked in the closet for everyone but Alfred, and he’d slept with some random guy on a Monday night.

Part of him thanked Peel for giving him the perfect excuse to be so fucking cliché. Loving Alfred seemed easy, and since he sure wasn’t going to make his report a one-sided thing, Edward was halfway to reporter position.

He smiled into the bedding and wondered how exactly he should go about romancing Alfred Paget.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> anywayyyyy the biggest shoutout to otter/clarameansbright for being the best beta and for writing gloriously tragic olivia caliban fics for me to freak out and cry over
> 
> thank you all so much for reading my funky lil fanfic! if you want to shout about musicals and period dramas with me, catch me on tumblr @ the briars!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oof i ran out of prewritten chapters and then it took me for-fucking-ever to get this one right. well, i hope it's right lol
> 
> also apparently ao3 does not love me very much and/or i am a dumbass, but the funky formatting is now fixed. omllllllllll i think i need to stop posting chapters at, like, midnight

_Step Four: Be Pushy_

_Though life can sometimes stand in the way of the progress of a relationship, giving your partner a more-than-gentle push towards your end goal can be a step in the wrong direction._

_You can probably tell where this is going._

•••

 

It was a suspiciously quiet morning, especially considering that Alfred had tossed and turned all night as he convinced himself that he’d explode from nerves some time before seven.

Despite the sensation of an impending train wreck building in his heart, Alfred dragged himself around the flat all morning while Mina tinkered with their endlessly frustrating coffee machine. Eventually, he’d crashed onto the couch to study the crack running out from the ceiling light through the plaster, din roaring in his ears.

The sun was casting pale light across the trinkets Mina kept on the side tables- figurines she’d been given at Christmas over the years, the miniature sailboat Alfred had given her after his annual trip to Plas Newydd, tiny vintage pill boxes with rosy-cheeked cherubs…

It was calming, and Alfred anchored himself on the ceramic rosebuds dotting the base of a gaudy lamp for long enough to gather his wits.

Coffee, maybe one of the scones his mother had sent over with his brothers on the weekend, and then work. He could do that.

A soft curse from the kitchen finally yanked Alfred from his moping and he shuffled across the rug to the doorframe.

“You good there, Mina?” he called, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“All I want is coffee, goddammit.”

Alfred sighed and rested his head against the molding. This most certainly wasn’t the day to go through caffeine withdrawal. “Do you know if Harriet has one?”

“No, she just steals from work.”

“Genius, but I’m trying to stay on the Duchess’s good side. Wanna try the place by work?”

Mina popped her head out from behind the offending machine. “The hipster one?” she asked, scrunching her nose. The lines were always abhorrent and Victoria’s review had been scathing.

“Yeah. Ernst said their espresso is at least invigorating.”

“I have very low standards,” Mina sighed, halfheartedly poking at her empty cup while Alfred left to try and find a matching set of socks.

 

Mina was bouncing in line, as was her custom, nose buried in an obnoxiously fluorescent orange scarf. A sudden, early winter had snapped into place overnight, leaving the tips of Alfred’s fingers numb and sending hordes of pedestrians swarming into the cozy little shops that lined the Buckingham’s block. Alfred was considering leaving to grab a cup of the horrible black stuff the Duchess forced them all to keep in stock (which, for some unbeknownst reason, Harriet adored) instead of lingering in line for another ten minutes. Being late two days in a row seemed a tad too risky.

Of course, the notion of leaving was blown to the wind when he spotted a familiar shock of dark hair bobbing between the crowd. His heart threatened to leap from his chest.

_“That’s him,”_ he hissed, slapping indiscriminately in the direction of Mina’s shoulder.

“Who?” She craned her neck to try and follow his stare.

“Edward- there, with the reddish coat.”

Mina let out a low whistle. “Oh gosh, this is much better lighting.”

“What do I do?”

“Talk to him. Ask him out. You only have a week left.”

Alfred took a deep breath and shook himself. _One week._

The f barista motioned them forward and Mina ordered Alfred’s regular while he slipped off to try and catch Edward before he left.

He was easy to track through the throngs of customers, mahogany jacket and considerable height standing out among the mess. The adrenaline of the moment kept Alfred from dwelling on what would happen after, which left him hopelessly paralyzed the instant his hand caught Edward’s arm and those lovely brown eyes found him again.

“Hi?” Edward said curiously, brow furrowing a little as Alfred spun a grin.

“Hi,” he said, rather breathlessly, for as much as he acted (or, really, performed,) around Edward, his deep-seated attraction for the man was becoming undeniable. “Glad I caught you here.”

Edward seemed to have composed himself, and he smiled (brilliantly, handsomely, _beautifully_ ) back as he guided them into a relatively quiet corner. “I’m glad, too.”

Alfred swallowed at the genuine gleam in Edward’s eye. “I was wondering if you’d be free tomorrow. Or tonight, really.”

“I don’t have plans, no.”

“Perfect. See, my friend has two tickets to _Twelfth Night_ at Almeida that she’d like to get rid of.”

Edward tilted his head. “Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Sounds good.”

Alfred popped up onto his toes to press a kiss to Edward’s cheek, reveling in his slight inhale before using the blur of the moment to slip off into the crowd to get his coffee.

Something akin to shame bubbled in his stomach. He knew what he was doing- turning himself into an enigma had long been his choice of flirtation, and the whole situation with Edward was the perfect time to utilize it.

It felt horribly, horribly wrong.

Mina was waiting with his cup of coffee, and the fact that she didn’t comment on Alfred chugging half of it right away made him love her even more.

 

The Duchess called an impromptu meeting and spent the whole time staring intently at Alfred, who tried to hide behind his laptop while Harriet and Victoria tried to wrangle everyone into casting the ballot on which cover design to use. In every one, Alfred’s article stood at the forefront, just below the special they’d managed to get on some elusive German noblewoman, font bold and burned into the back of Alfred’s mind for the rest of the day. And he still had to get tickets to _Twelfth Night_ , which was going to be impossible, on top of trying to ignore the Paget sibling group chat, which had somehow caught word of Alfred’s exploits in Soho the other night.

After the meeting, Alfred dragged Mina and Harriet away from their desks to huddled on one of the plush couches in the corner and desperately try to find spare tickets to _Twelfth Night_.

“Does he even like _Twelfth Night_?” Harriet grumbled, faint jazzy hold music coming from her headphones. It seemed the inquiries line was absurdly popular.

“No. He hates Shakespeare.”

Mina huffed out a laugh. “Poor guy, honestly. Remember when you tried to make me sit through _Hamlet_ , Alfred?”

“You fell asleep before intermission.”

“It’s boring!”

“It’s a classic!”

Harriet jumped and held up her hand to silence them, apparently having gotten through to the theatre. The plan was to pull the Buckingham editor card to beg for the last available seats, which had a fifty-fifty chance of playing out, and if not, Alfred was screwed.

He leaned into Mina’s side and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand.

He’d been alternating between guilt and excitement, caught between his wants and his needs. The Duchess’s judgemental eyes had merely strengthened his spite, his want to prove that he was more than the boring articles she kept assigning him, to hold something over her for once. It was dumb, sure, but Alfred was a self-indulgent man, and he was going to let himself play the game this time.

Then again, Edward was… everything. He was kind and brilliant and funny and sweet, not to mention gorgeous, and Alfred was undeniably taken with him. Despite his drive to craft the perfect, genuine article of his dreams, he felt his infatuation slipping between him and that far-off prototype. He was barely even torturing the man, and the absurd number of exaggerated adjectives in his writing only proved his struggle to turn his tiny dating taboos into major transgressions.

And still he did not understand Edward. Or, rather, he could not bring himself to face the two realities he was faced with. Edward hating him was crippling, and Edward loving him was equally so.

Alfred scoffed at the idea of Edward loving him so soon, and yet it seemed that the possibility was more likely than he wanted it to be, for something deep in his heart had stirred in its awakening, clawing at his insides, aching to come out.

He was jerked back to reality by a cheer from Harriet and let out a long sigh, somewhere between relief and terror.

“You have tickets for tomorrow at seven,” Harriet said, standing and stretching languidly while Mina gave a halfhearted _woo-hoo_.

 

•••

 

Alfred was coming at six, just enough time to grab something at one of the little dive bars that littered the neighborhood and settle in before the play. Edward figured that Alfred was the kind of man who had delved extensively into classic literature as a teen (mostly based on his reaction to Wilde that night at Ciro’s, but also on some deep feeling of residual grandeur surrounding Alfred and his persona), and Shakespeare had probably slipped in there somewhere, which meant that Edward had been up with summaries of his most famous plays until midnight. Josephine had railed on him for being weird about it all, but considering that his nerves had boiled down to the customary ‘whatever shall I wear’ and ‘whatever shall we talk about’, he supposed it had helped him in some form.

Josephine, off on her lunch break, was propped on his side table while he rustled through laundry.

“Try the gray one you passed.”

“There’s a stain on the sleeve,” Edward called, pulling it out nonetheless and holding the cuff up to the camera so Josephine could see. She sighed.

“Roll it up, then. It’s your best option.”

“It’s October.”

“It’s _hot_.”

Edward made an exaggerated retching noise while Josephine grumbled, but disappeared into his closet to try it on nevertheless.

There was a low buzzing anxiety in his chest, for in the thrill of the moment, he had unwittingly flung himself into what had the potential to be the worst date ever.

On that first night, Alfred had called attention to a picture of Josephine in _Macbeth_ as a teenager, leading Edward to grumble something about it being the worst experience of his life, so it wasn’t as if Alfred was completely unaware of his hatred of Shakespeare.

In fact, it was likely that Alfred knew full well, judging by the memory of his small smile at Edward’s complaints. Yet another dick move to add to his repertoire Edward smiled to himself and ducked out of the closet to show Josephine, who imparted him a thumbs up and promptly hung up, citing the end of her lunch break and flickering out into a resolute beep.

Edward sighed, tugging aimlessly at his folded-over cuffs. The stain was indeed gone, and he _did_ always admire the rolled up thing, so the outfit might play to his advantage, no matter how cold his forearms got.

His apartment seemed empty without Josephine’s boisterous laugh or Alfred’s light one. (Was it possible to miss something so dearly after a mere four days? He felt as though he were bordering on the edge of a precipice so deep he could never climb out, and the precipice gave way to glimmering ocean eyes.)

Running his hands over his exposed arms as a deep gray settled over the living room, Edward regretted getting dressed so early. It left too much time for contemplation, too much space for _ifs_ and _buts_ and _maybes_.

Florence had asked to have lunch with him, and they had settled into a corner of the office, fully aware of the eyes tracking their movements through the glass panels behind them. They’d been carefully amicable, all polite smiles and rare glimpses of truth between side-eyed glances at their coworkers on the office floor. It offered some small shred of peace, another to add to the reconstruction of what they had once pretended to be. Edward only hoped it would hold together the second time around.

He curled into the corner of the couch and checked for a text from Alfred (there was none, which was odd, considering their near constant banter since the coffee shop meeting). It was fascinating and terrifying how hollow he felt when he was alone, now, as if the presence of him had made his absence more poignant.

Edward wanted to grab himself by the shoulders and shake vigorously, sure he was living in a half-dream world, for how else could such an angel be gracing his startlingly drab life? He felt like a sailor caught in the blinding beam of a lighthouse at last, his days upon a merciless sea over. Perhaps it had something to do with the starving creature within, who craved nothing but touch and the soft looks he’d pretended to share with Florence. It was like there was a sinkhole in his chest, which had given way beneath the slightest weight, fractured after years of masquerading as solid earth.

He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth to push back the sudden wave of emotion that overcame him, blinking away something that might have become tears.

Could he ache for something he thought he had?

His phone buzzed against the couch and his heart leaped into his throat and stomach and back again, but it was only an email notification from Peel.

“Damn it,” he muttered, though he was unsure whether it was directed towards his phone or himself.

It was going to be an endless night, for better or for worse.

 

Their seats were tucked into a corner, clearly the last available, which made Edward wonder how real Alfred’s friend was, but considering the direction Alfred’s hands were wandering, he didn’t particularly care.

The hand slipped beneath Edward’s thigh, slim fingers curling against the plush crimson velvet. Edward threw him an incredulous look, and Alfred shrugged.

“I’m cold.”

“Sure,” Edward laughed, pressing the side of his leg closer to Alfred’s nonetheless.

The Almeida was certainly chilly, though, and Edward was beginning to regret taking Josephine’s questionable fashion advice, but judging by the insistent kiss Alfred had given him in the cab, it was working in his favor.

Edward felt floaty in his contentment. It had been nearly innate to sink into the backseat with Alfred pressed against him, to hold his hand on the way in, to hide a laugh at Alfred’s ill-timed puns. He had leaned down to whisper something into Alfred’s ear, and the sheer domesticity of the way he had leaned back and tipped his head up to meet Edward’s eyes had made his breath catch.

And it had only been four days.

The lights dimmed and Alfred turned to tuck his back against Edward’s side, glancing over his shoulder with a happy glint in his eyes. A giddy satisfaction rose within him as he realized the mask had crumbled away at last, and the spotlight fell on Orsino, who lamented in a way Edward once feared he might have to. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the biggest hugs to my beta, otter/clarameansbright, for being the best friend and critic that i could ever hope for
> 
> alsO wtf is s3??? pls come yell about it with me on tumblr (@thebriars lol shamless plug) bc i have so much angst to release
> 
> thank you so much for reading!!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> couple things my dudes:
> 
> oooooof this took forever to get out bc writers block and whatnot but i'm actually really happy with this one so *shrug* 
> 
> theres... theres softcore smut about halfway through. nothing serious, nothing explicit, but certainly more than my normal offscreen stuff. just letting you guys know bc its different than what i normally write. also its probably really bad lol so be prepared

_Step Five: Be Clingy_

_We’ve all had that creeping thought that we’re being too much- whether it’s the frequency of our texts or the length of our hugs or even the way we seek out a friend repeatedly in a crowd. Still, the clinginess often associated with relationships is something else altogether. Everyone knows that friend whose partner has to check up every ten minutes or call at all hours of the night. It’s not pretty from any perspective, so…._

•••

 

They had hesitated just outside Alfred’s apartment, trading kisses while he fumbled with the keys. Edward’s hand was steady on his waist, and they muffled laughs and quips in the moments where Alfred pulled away to unlock the door, slipping towards the entrance inch by inch, mumbling against each other’s lips.

“It’ll be midnight by the time you get home, at this rate,” Alfred whispered, knowing Mina was either dead asleep or crouched at the door with Harriet, trying to listen in.

“So?” Edward grinned and tugged him in for something longer, something that made Alfred want to kick Mina out to crash on Harriet’s couch and divest his bed of the throw pillow collection for a greater purpose.

Alfred huffed and bounced up onto his toes to look Edward straight in the eye. “I’d want nothing more, but if you want to get any sleep at all tonight, you’d better catch a bus now.”

He sighed. “Why are you so logical?”

“One of us has to be, right?” Alfred teased, reaching up to ruffle Edward’s loose curls and lingering there in his arms for a moment too long for his own sanity.

The smile that crossed Edward’s face was so terribly genuine, and something in Alfred’s gut curled tight in shame.

“I’ll see you tomorrow?” he offered, and Edward grimaced ruefully.

“Work function, but I’ll call afterwards.”

“Perfect,” he whispered, and slipped into the apartment at just three minutes past eleven.

It had been a long night.

Alfred sank against the door, quickly pressing his ear to the crack between it and the wall to make sure Edward’s footsteps had faded away before he let out a long groan, dropping his head into his hands.

Everything had gone horribly, horribly right.

Edward had made low, snide comments in Alfred’s ear throughout the play, which slowly turned into quiet murmurings of appreciation for the lighting and the costumes and the acting. Alfred was glad that he had his back to Edward so he couldn’t see the uncharacteristic frown growing on his face. Things weren’t going quite as he hoped.

Then again, the soft glow of Edward’s eyes as they slipped through yellow-lit streets, dragging out the trip back to Alfred’s as long as they could. Hand in hand, noses buried in coat collars against the biting wind stirred up by the night, something quiet and familiar settling between them.

It was mildly terrifying, how fast they fell into place. Alfred on the left, Edward’s thumb on top, Alfred in the middle seat with Edward pressed against the door… it all made sense, and they found it naturally.

That had never happened before.

Alfred dug his fingers into the doormat and closed his eyes, bracing for that horrible impact with reality.

 

Drinks with the crowd at Ciro’s was a welcome relief, even though his eye was continuously drawn to the apartment building across the street (even though he _knew_ Edward was at some company dinner, probably doing important things and talking to important people, and probably not thinking about Alfred and his proximity to Edward’s flat and his bed and his couch...).

But it was a good distraction- Ernst and Harriet side-eyeing each other all night and disappearing halfway through Mina’s stint on the karaoke stage, Alfred and Victoria snickering at Albert’s inability to hold his drink, and a nostalgic and dramatic retelling of Alfred’s 18th birthday. It was comforting.

And still, he missed Edward. It had been only five days, and yet there was a deep and instinctual knowledge that Alfred really just wanted to be spending his Friday nights with _him_. Spending time with his friends only made him want them to meet Edward more, for he was sure they would love him. How could they not?

It was curious, how much Alfred thought of him. Edward was on his mind day and night- his eyes, the unknowingly adorable things he did and said, the way he poked at Alfred like Mina would, like best friends…

He was infuriatingly perfect.

“Why the long face?” Victoria asked. Albert was dozing on her shoulder, and Ernst and Harriet were still nowhere to be found.

Alfred shrugged. “Got a lot on my mind.”

“It’s not the article, is it?”

“It’s always the article,” Mina sighed. The tipsy, giggly haze of the evening had worn down into a vague melancholy cloud, and even the ever-chipper Victoria looked tired.

“You’ve fallen for him? The guy you slept with?”

Alfred hesitated. “I think so.” _I know so._ Victoria frowned and based on the look in her eye, Alfred knew it was no use pretending that his article was going to be anything more than average. “I can’t bring myself to do anything crazy, so I’ve been doing dumb little generic things and the Duchess is probably going to kick my ass for it.”

Mina hiccupped, pressing the back of her hand against her lips and grimacing. “The Duchess is going to kick _everyone’s_ ass if we don’t get an official cover design to her over the weekend.”

They sat in quiet for a little while longer, leaving Victoria to muse over something and letting Albert nap while Alfred traced the little carvings along the edge of the table with his fingertip.

He was going to have to completely flip around on Edward and torment him (impossible), fake it (unlikely), or go freelance in the end and write what he wanted. Harriet would probably let him get published in the Buckingham under a pseudonym, but the idea of being so reliant on his talent and nothing more was terrifying. He was good, but not _that_ good.

Mina jabbed at his shoulder. “Let’s get out of here before we both start sobbing.”

“I don’t _sob_.”

“You absolutely sob,” Victoria retorted.

“When have you ever seen me cry?”

“I haven’t, it’s just your aura.”

“Oh God, not the auras,” Mina groaned. Victoria’s occult obsession had reared its head sporadically over the years, and whether it was a séance dinner party or a tarot card reading, it was always equally horrifying.

Victoria pretended to be aghast while Alfred and Mina struggled with their coats, Mina yawning the whole time. Harriet was still nowhere in sight (which meant she and Ernst had fallen into some bed somewhere), and the streets were sinking into quiet.

Mina leaned her head on his shoulder while they waited for a cab, sighing and toying with a stray bit of fringe from her scarf. Exhaustion had settled upon them like a heavy blanket, the product of a week of turmoil, late nights spent collaborating on Alfred’s article, and the drinks they’d had with their friends.

But as they slipped into the warmth of a cab, Alfred took comfort in the easy familiarity of the evening.

He would see Edward tomorrow, probably, and the prospect was exciting in and of itself, not to mention the path their meeting would lead to(as implied by the lingering nature of their parting on Thursday).

Alfred smiled as Mina dozed off against him, the flashing purple glow of the city a steady reminder of the realness of it all.

 

It seemed neither of them could wait until the next day, for Alfred found himself awake long after Mina had gone to bed, talking to Edward. They stayed up late on the phone (and never had Alfred been more thankful for video calls, for seeing Edward’s smile was nothing short of a relief). They muffled their laughs in a halfhearted attempt to leave Mina undisturbed in the room next to Alfred’s, dim lamplight just enough to illuminate the vague contours of their faces in the grainy feed. Alfred traced the empty space in the bed next to him, as if he could conjure Edward up into reality with nothing but his imagination. He could almost taste the remnants of that final kiss in the hall, almost feel those strong hands finding his own, almost see them fumbling beneath the covers that night after Ciro’s, (and truly fumbling, nothing better than schoolboys stealing touches in the night, for something about Edward’s glimmering eyes in the dark glow of his flat made Alfred lose his composure, his breath catching in his throat, suddenly at a loss, the control he prided himself over gone in a second). He could see those eyes now, could almost smell the faintest trace of cinnamon on the air, and it snatched something integral and nameless from his chest.

Time rolled well into the early hours of the morning before Edward finally fell asleep, the call still connected, his quiet breaths and peaceful expression betraying him. Alfred had very nearly imploded, unsure whether to hang up the call, but eventually, the silence between them lulled him off into dream-world as well.

 

•••

 

Edward awoke to Alfred and a distant sensation of perfection.

Of course, his phone failed him before he could properly grasp the absolute novelty of the whole incident or the embarrassment of falling asleep in the middle of a conversation with the man who might very possibly be in love with, and Alfred’s soft features cut to black.

“Goddammit,” Edward muttered, rolling onto his back and staring up at the ceiling in some pitiful search for answers.

Peel had made several suggestive jokes at his expense the night before, much to the chagrin of Edward and the other guests. Melbourne had looked thoroughly confused, which was a long-awaited reassurance that Peel was keeping his word. Still, talking politics with Peel was always a bit of a rocky ride, for as successful as he was, he was rather out of touch with the world. If anything, the whole incident only cemented his determination to get the job with Melbourne. Not as if he was really working for it- even if things were moving at the speed of light, completely unprecedented, it wasn’t a bad thing at all. Ten days was plenty of time, especially considering how eager Alfred seemed to be.

Still, he felt rather terrible, for no matter how much he genuinely liked Alfred, he was still working with ulterior motives.

But he had only a few hours until Alfred’s arrival, which meant a few hours to wrangle the clutter strewn around his flat and psych himself up (which meant a pep talk from Josephine and maybe a bit of wine), so he forced himself to roll out of bed.

He was glad more than ever that he had ended things with Florence, for now he had the freedom to spend his mornings blasting music and eating a bagel while cleaning haphazardly without feeling her incredulous eyes on the back of his head. She had always been so practical, straight-laced and prim, and though Edward was admittedly similar, he’d resented the feeling of disappointment she radiated when he relaxed.

And now he was genuinely productive! There was a distinct and undeniable happiness radiating around him, and all signs pointed to Alfred as its source. He felt like himself again, which was a sensation akin to breathing the fresh air of the moor behind his childhood home or sinking into a warm bed during the dead of winter.

Edward organized his books and papers into vague piles, the strange folk jigs his mother sent him on CD every Christmas playing in the background, nerves for the night fading into gleeful anticipation.

 

The nerves came back bit by bit with every moment that Alfred was late, for he said he would be around at six and the clock was nearing ten-past and Edward was horribly paranoid.

At least the flat was clean – all the books neatly arranged back on the shelves and his papers shoved into his bag (haphazardly, but nevertheless put away), all the random coffee mugs strewn about washed and tucked into the cupboards, the bedsheets straightened and spare bits of laundry shoved into his closet.

And still Alfred was not there.

He fretted and wrung his hands a little, which was only doubling his anxiety, the trepidation hanging off every piece of him.

And then there was a knock on the door and he was forcing himself to breathe and calm himself enough to unlock it.

Alfred stood there, looking nearly serene. Edward, who was trying so hard to simply stay standing, felt his words hitch in his throat.

“Hello,” Alfred said, sheepish. “Sorry I was late. Traffic got in my way.”

Edward swallowed and stepped back to let Alfred in. “No apologies needed.”

Alfred turned with a grin and extended his hand, something deliberate flickering in his eyes. Edward shut the door decisively and took his hand gladly, drinking in the sight of him before their lips met and shut the world out, leaving nothing but them and the bedroom, just feet away.

 

It was only their third time together, and yet Edward felt as though they already knew every last intimate detail of the other. He knew where to touch, where to kiss, and just what to say to make Alfred flash him that dazzling smile. It seemed Alfred knew just how to move and how to graze his teeth across Edward’s skin and how to flick his gaze upward with that knowing look in his eye. Edward found his fingers entangled in soft blond locks, found a trail down from his jaw smarting with soft pink marks, found himself giving way to something uncontrollable and carnal.

For Alfred was beautiful and he kissed so well and he loved so well and the rhythm of their movements felt like the steady beat of a familiar song and Edward had never been so thoroughly satisfied before.

He dug his fingers into the mattress and into the soft curve of Alfred’s waist and bit back a grin, for grinning when Alfred was doing _that_ didn’t seem quite appropriate.  

 

•••

 

_Step Six: Mess With His Stuff_

_Whether it’s a nosy parent, mischievous sibling, or questionable roommate, having your personal space invaded is never anything but horrible. And it’s even worse when it’s someone you actually expect to respect your stuff, which meant I had to do some snooping._

 

•••

 

Alfred plopped on the edge of Edward’s bed, guitar resting across his thighs, and ran his hands over the corded strings and down the sleek side of the body. It was lighter than he thought, hollow under his touch, and even to his inexperienced eye, it looked expensive, which only made the anxiety curling in his gut grow. Edward was clunking around in the bathroom and Alfred felt supremely awful for digging the thing out of his closet, but he thought of the Duchess’s face from earlier and her sneer at his sample article, and promptly brought the back of his nails down across the strings. He winced at the cacophony and stilled them with his palm, waiting in a paralyzing dread for Edward to come running.

Sure enough, the clunking in the bathroom paused, and Alfred plucked a horrendous discord, as if to assure Edward that, yes, he had heard right.

Footsteps came down the hall as the notes faded out. Alfred sat shock still, trying not to let his face betray the fear roiling in his stomach.

“Were you- oh.”

There was an emptiness in Edward’s voice that made Alfred decide to say ‘fuck it’ to being rude. He smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, I was looking for a shirt to steal and…”

Edward exhaled and slid over to sit beside Alfred, ghosting a finger across the tuning knobs. “No, you’re fine. It’s just been a long time.”

Alfred turned, pausing to admire the chestnut glow of Edward’s curls, backlit by the distant glow of the bathroom, not entirely sure of the next move to make. “Can I ask why?”

“It was my dad’s. He used to play as a college student and he taught me, too. Florence never really liked guitar, though,” he shrugged. “But I think I remember a few chords.”

Alfred grinned and started to pass it off to Edward’s lap. “Show me?”

“Yeah,” Edward breathed, the tiniest quiver at the edge of his voice, but instead of taking it from him, he scooted around to fit Alfred between his legs, resting his chin cautiously on his shoulder, hands cupping Alfred’s on the strings.

Alfred jerked a breath and tipped his head back and to the side to flick his lips across Edward’s cheek. “My sister plays, so I know a little. C, right?”

“Right,” Edward smiled, their fingers moving in tandem to press against the strings, cool frets digging into Alfred’s skin. “Press down all the way, or else it sounds weird.”

Alfred nodded, catching on the tiniest bit of stubble and stifling a laugh as Edward pushed his hand this way and that.

“Strum now,” he whispered, pulling his hands back to rest on Alfred’s biceps. It sounded relatively un-terrible, but they both cringed nonetheless.

“Your turn,” Alfred said, pulling his hands up in surrender. Edward muffled a laugh in Alfred’s shoulder and took up the incentive, plucking a riff that made Alfred snort at the memory of his earlier dabbles.

“Okay?”

“More than okay. Brilliant.”

Edward flushed and buried his nose into the side of Alfred’s neck. Alfred reached back to tangle his fingers in soft curls, deep guilt aching in his chest. Strike three.

 

•••

 

There, with Alfred tucked against him, fingers hesitant on the strings, Edward felt the last of Alfred’s shell melt away, leaving nothing but the true man beneath. Edward felt as though he was six again, cradling a sculpted bird in his grandmother’s living room, frozen there for fear of shattering the delicate creature. He worried that he was too stiff, suddenly, or that his chin pressed too hard on Alfred’s porcelain shoulder. The guitar was cold in his hands and Alfred was wonderfully warm, and the undeniable urge to stay there around him forever came over him like a wave.

 

•••

 

Alfred did not want to leave. The simple fact was that now that they were alone - truly alone - going home without Edward’s hand in his was unthinkable. He held his breath, afraid that the slightest movement would break the great tenacity of the moment. He felt every nerve in his body sparking into flame, more than it had just half an hour before, entangled in Edward and his cinnamon-scented sheets. He felt the air become brittle and fragile, glass encircling them, oxygen freezing into stained glass. This was the moment that poets breathed and pushed and prodded into words, insignificant words, words that could never describe the reverberating power of the feeling that sank into his chest. This was a living entity, a spirit with strong hands and a throbbing heart, one who gripped Alfred in its vice and inspired simultaneous awe and fear, one who threaded its fingers in the space between reason and desire, one who ebbed and flowed through his memories and hopes and dreams and _God_ , Edward and his warm brown eyes and soft smile and steady hands and quick humor and brilliance-

And then Edward shifted, shattering the glass and leaving Alfred cold and wondering whether Edward had felt the great depth of it all in the way he had. A chill quite different from the absence of warmth behind him grew steadily within him, for maybe he was alone in his complete attraction. Maybe Edward was annoyed or upset or uninterested. Maybe he _would_ dump Alfred and leave him cold forever, afflicted with the unyielding emptiness creeping up his spine for all eternity. And now it was late and Mina had texted to see if he was coming home and yes, he was, but he could hardly bear it.

And then Edward was running a hand down to catch Alfred’s and he turned to meet those shining dark eyes and every hollow space in his chest was gone, replaced with warmth and comfort and something heavy, something Alfred almost dared call love. And suddenly the blasted article was gone from his mind and it was simply them, quiet beneath the cover of night.

“I think I’m in love with you,” he breathed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ummmmmmmm yeah thank you to my wonderful beta, otter/clarameansbright, who is always willing to be salty about literally everything with me. (shaboom skadoosh love youuu!) and thank you for reading and, if you so deem, dropping a comment!
> 
> also, i imagined the guitar riff as the one from the beginning of sea wolf's 'dear fellow traveler', which is simultaneously my favorite song ever and the most drumfred-y song to have ever existed.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh my GOD sorry this took so long!! the tea is that this chapter really just needed to be filler, in a way, to keep everything moving, which means it was a) impossible to write and b) insufferably long and plotless. there's an absurd amount of fluff though and a lot of foreshadowing. 
> 
> still, it's been like 2 weeks since i updated and i said i was going to get it up around monday but here we are on saturday whoops

_Step Seven: Snoop_

_Curiosity is inherent to human nature, but that drive to explore can easily cross a line when it comes to a relationship. The urge to know absolutely everything about a partner is undeniably strong, especially when you think you’ve stumbled across something serious. But, no matter how harmless your investigation may seem, there’s a certain level of trust that is broken when you pry around a little too much in a brand new relationship._

_And so, after I’d found a particularly interesting tidbit in Edward’s life, I knew I had to check it out._

_•••_

 

When Edward was seven, he and Josephine had run off to the creek a few miles from his house, and gotten nearly halfway there before their worried mother and several exasperated neighbors got ahold of them. He hadn’t quite understood the hubbub, for it was a pleasant Saturday morning, the sky a pale September blue and the wind quiet in the tall grasses that lined the path to the ravine, and going there seemed more a will of fate than an adventure of his own free volition.

And now there were only pale blue eyes and whispers quiet in the darkness of a bar or a bed or a theatre, and yet Edward still felt that heavy reassurance of predestination in his blood.

So when Alfred said those words, too loud to be subconscious or unintentional, too clear to be anything but sincere, Edward had not listened to the hisses of the rational piece of him, the piece of him that he’d seen in the mirror at his father’s party, the piece of him that was the boy in the suit and the boy with a velvet-lined box in his pocket and the boy with a fiancée.

He followed fate’s finger down the path it pointed, and if the path led to Alfred’s lips, then so be it.

 

•••

 

The next morning was nothing short of dreamlike, hazy and dusty and gold. Alfred, awake first again, rose onto his elbows carefully, unsure of what his intent really was.

The greater part of him was rolling with anxiety (why wouldn’t he be, when he had said _that_ ), and every shred of self-preservation within him screamed to run away before he had to face those mournful eyes and fight their power. And yet, looking down at Edward, asleep amongst the rumpled sheets, he wanted to do anything but leave.

Shame and anger curled within him, accompanied by a swarm of confusion – not so much as to why he had said _that_ , for the answer was obvious (his mind summoned images of Edward framed in pale yellow and his hands so strong and warm and comforting). No, the true mystery laid in which part of him had thought the words in the first place.

There was no denying that he was feeling _something,_ something simultaneously innate and completely foreign, something that made him feel warm from the inside out and lured him closer to Edward and his frank mystery. _Tall, dark stranger_ , Harriet had called him once, and though Alfred had laughed, it was almost funny how true it really was. And now he wished he could call Harriet and make her explain his emotions to him, for it seemed she would be able to discern which part of Alfred had been talking last night. Was it Alfred the journalist or Alfred the man? The boy, really, lost in unfamiliar halls without a map. The boy who lingered too long, propped on his elbow, in bed with the man he had confessed his love to the night before, not even a week after they had met.

And the worst thing was that it was kind of true. Or, it had the potential to be, given time and a couple conversations and the will of whatever higher power was playing puppeteer with Alfred at the moment.

But still, if the roles of the night had been reversed, if Edward had said _that_ to Alfred… any sane man would have turned tail right then and there, but either Edward was less than sane or far more forgiving than Alfred expected anyone to be. _Just further proof he’s an angel_.

Guilt crawled up through him, heavy and stifling. Putting Edward on the spot like that had been horribly unfair – his first truly dickish move, Alfred thought bitterly. It was nothing short of mean, something Alfred never thought he would do. It was so… Mina-esque, hasty and immature, the product of either desperation or infatuation beyond reason. And Alfred couldn’t tell where he fell – perhaps it had been a subconscious last-ditch attempt towards actually writing a good story, or it might have been an outcry of the heart, a childish fear of rejection driving him towards total absurdity.

Or maybe it was simply the truth.

Alfred sighed and slumped back onto the mattress, half hoping that Edward would stay asleep for another hour or so, just so he could figure it all out and watch the peace on his face for a little while longer.

The sight of Edward, quiet and seeming nearly delicate in the early morning light, brought a calm upon Alfred, and for a moment, he pushed his worries away.

Edward had taken it gracefully – a small smile and a gentle kiss and nothing more – so it wasn’t as if Alfred’s potential impasse had worked in the first place. ( _Still no real substance for that blasted article._ ) Though the memory of the incident made his insides crumple and sour, the recollection of that fleeting moment between them was sweet. Unbearably so, actually.

Alfred reached out to brush his fingertips over the top Edward’s cheek, ever so faintly trying to draw some comfort from the touch.

And who was Florence?

Some small jealous piece of him had pondered the name, picking it over in the seconds between kisses and deep embarrassment. Alfred prided himself over his passive nature, never being the one to obsess over his date’s ex, and yet something about the way Edward had said her name, as if he were just on the edge of a pit of bad memories, made something unknown and ugly squeeze in his chest.

He’d have to ask Harriet about that, too.

The sensible part of him suggested to just _ask_ , but the steadily growing part of him, the part that tried so hard to be cruel and strange to Edward, whispered something frightening and yet tantalizing. Alfred had learned to pry excellently as a child (as one does when one has more siblings than stars in the sky), so it wasn’t as if he couldn’t stalk a little bit and find out who the mysterious Florence was on his own.

And still, it seemed too sensitive, too recent and raw, and Alfred wouldn’t, _couldn’t_ do it.

_No._

And so it was decided, and just in time, too, for  Edward was stirring. Alfred wondered if he should pretend to sleep again, as he had that first morning, and see what happened, but Edward’s eyes were open too soon and the sight of them blew every last reservation about facing the day ahead.

“Good morning,” Edward whispered, and everything made sense again.

 

“You like coffee, right?”

Alfred, perched on the counter while Edward fiddled with the handle of a cabinet, nodded. “Black.”

“Black? Are you sure we like each other?”

“What, you have something against pure caffeine?”

“No, just against stuff that’s _disgusting_.”

Alfred clasped a hand to his chest, mock offended, while Edward scrunched his nose and went to dig out some garden-variety dark roast.

The domesticity of it was something completely new and thoroughly delightful. Alfred swung his feet a little as Edward flicked on the news, watching the way his curls flopped over into his eyes when he leaned over. He could hardly keep his admiration to himself.

“You’re beautiful, you know.”

Edward glanced back suddenly, pink already rising to his cheeks. “Oh, stop.”

“I speak nothing but the truth,” Alfred said, smiling lightly and raising his hands in surrender.

Edward scoffed and went to check the state of the coffee. “You’re one to talk.”

“Oh, don’t. You’re gorgeous and you know it.”

“I’m not _denying_ it –,”

“– and modest, too!”

Edward crinkled his nose again and Alfred very nearly fell off the counter.

God, what was happening to him? To them? Were they even a _them_?

Alfred shook himself while Edward grumbled about having no half-and-half, trying to find a distraction in the pictures Edward had stuck on the fridge. Edward and the sister from the pictures in the hallway, a group of friends around a table in a dim restaurant, Edward among them, a picture of what seemed to be his parents amongst neat rows of beaming yellow marigolds, and a dozen other tidbits from a life Alfred really didn’t know much about.

Edward offered him a mug and he took it gladly, remaining on the counter while Edward stood between his knees, eyes flicking up to meet Alfred’s over the rim of his own cup. Alfred tilted his head and studied Edward’s soft eyes, the sharp cut of his cheekbones and the faint worry lines between his brows. He was truly a masterpiece.

 “I don’t know anything about you,” Alfred said, bluntly, as all good conversations start.

Edward shrugged. “There isn’t much to know. I grew up in Scotland and I moved here for uni.”

“Oh, come on; you’re far more interesting than that.”

“Maybe,” Edward said, laughing a little and gesturing towards the living room. The news was still running faintly in the background, but the sunlight-bathed sofa would certainly be better for the long and glorious conversation Alfred was hoping to glean from him.

They settled there and Alfred glanced down to the street below, wondering why he hadn’t been swarmed by texts from Mina and Harriet yet. Perhaps they’d finally decided to let him have his morning peace.

“How much of a story do you want?”

Edward’s voice, just ever so slightly uncertain, snapped Alfred back into place, and he swung his legs up into Edward’s lap decisively. “Give me everything you’ve got.”

“Really? Maybe later.”

Alfred swatted his shoulder lightly and Edward snorted. Victoria would have retched had she seen their sappiness.

“I have a sister – she’s just a few years older than me and lives in New Orleans now, for some reason. You’ve probably seen her in the photos all over. We went on a lot of adventures while on holiday with our parents.” Edward traced repetitive patterns into Alfred’s thigh and worked his bottom lip, as if he was trying to think of the right things to say.

Alfred sipped his coffee and ventured out onto a treacherous limb. “And your parents?”

Edward shrugged. “Fine, I guess. My mother’s just tired and my father’s two-faced. Kind with us and cutthroat with everyone else.” Alfred made a point of being visibly interested and understanding, which did indeed give Edward the confidence to keep going. “I think that’s why Josephine left, actually – he’s always wanted a lot from us both. And that’s why I’m here, really, working for Westminster. I’d much rather be reporting in real time rather than trying to keep up with Peel and all his weird demands. And then there’s Florence, and how I can never quite tell if she hates me or not, or if I’m supposed to hate her.”

“Sounds like there’s a history there.”

He snorted, somewhat bitterly. “That’s one way to put it. We were engaged for almost six years, and dated for three before that.” Alfred coughed, almost choking on the coffee, and Edward winced, confidence falling from his face. “I probably should have mentioned that.”

Alfred scrambled to reassure him, splashing a bit of coffee onto his sweatpants in his hurry to cup Edward’s cheek in his hand. “No, no, we’ve only known each other for a week. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

“A week? Really? It feels like years.”

“I know,” Alfred whispered, dropping back against the arm of the couch. It seemed his own gutsiness had been drained from the declarations of the night before, for he couldn’t bring himself to voice the thousands of adorations that came to mind. He swallowed and tried to redirect his own thoughts. “Back to Florence – nine whole years? God, how did that end?”

“Terribly!” Edward said with astonishing conviction. Alfred chuckled and they somehow managed to move even closer together, Edward tipping slightly to pillow his head on Alfred’s shoulder. Alfred feared he’d be able to hear his racing heart.

Edward sighed and Alfred set the coffee aside in order to bring Edward’s hand into both his own, rubbing small circles into the space between his thumb and finger.

“I never loved her, but she was nice and I figured we could be friendly enough with each other to marry for mutual gain or something. And our families liked the idea – I never planned on marrying for love, anyway.” (Alfred tugged them even closer together, diminishing the space between them.) “But then I had one of those dumb catharsis moments and realized I’d much rather be happy and make out with boys than be stuck with Florence. Not that she was cruel or anything – if anyone was cruel, it was me – but rather that we weren’t similar. At all. The whole guitar thing was just one of many. And then Josephine gave a rousing pep talk and I blurted it all out to her at dinner with her parents and it… was not fun.”

Alfred wondered just how much Edward had told them, if he’d spilled it all out in one fell swoop, and if so, how it had gone over. He wondered how much his parents knew about the _real_ Edward, if Alfred could even speak to that inner spirit he so longed to know, or if they could ever picture their successful son in a position like the one he was in now – curled into the chest of a man who was practically seated in his lap. It was vaguely comically and mostly depressing. Alfred pressed his lips to the crown of Edward’s head in gentle encouragement.

“She moved out and I moved flats to try and start over, but that’s hard when you work for the same office.”

Alfred laughed a little, taking Edward’s own coffee and dropping it haphazardly onto the side table alongside his own in order to rearrange into a tangled embrace. “Yeah, why’d you decide to work at the same place as your fiancée?”

“She thought it was… cute.”

Alfred left that untouched and instead took the initiative to drop a kiss into Edward’s soft curls again, and then another on his forehead. They were quiet for a moment, Alfred cautiously balancing between giving Edward his time and urging him forward in order to make sure he didn’t lose the trust they’d been slowly building over the course of the conversation.

Carefully, he started again. “Does she – _did_ she – love you?”

Edward was silent for a moment. “I don’t know. I hope not.” His voice was tinged with hopelessness that made Alfred want to rip the past apart and give Edward a happy youth, one filled with late nights at Ciro’s with Alfred’s crowd and kisses traded on the sly and conversations on paper in the quiet of a library.

“So,” he ventured, not quite wanting to leave Edward contemplating Florence and the weight of that situation for long, “is this your first… uh, romp, I guess, with a guy?”

“Practically. I kissed a boy when I was nearly thirteen and freaked us both out enough that he ran off and I didn’t do anything with anyone until Florence came along. And then that ended just a little while ago and I’m not sure how long you’re supposed to wait to date again after being with someone for almost ten years.”

Alfred hummed. “You should call up this boy you kissed and let him know that you didn’t mean to scare him.”

“Can’t.”

“Why not? I’ll cheer you on.”

“He’s dead, actually, so that would be rather difficult.”

Alfred froze. “Oh.”

“No, don’t worry about it. It’s been five years now and we weren’t much closer after the whole incident.” Edward glanced up slightly with reassurance painted heavy across his face. “He looked a lot like you, actually. Same hair.”

Alfred swallowed. “Full circle, you could say.”

“Exactly.”

 

•••

 

Edward could hear Alfred’s heartbeat, and as they began to fall into a hazy dream-land together, he was grateful for the rhythm keeping him grounded. He could smell his own cologne on the shirt Alfred had slept in and, if he curled a little closer into his chest and squeezed his eyes tighter, he could imagine it was night again and that they had all of eternity to stay tangled in each other.

In the silence, the deafening silence in his head, he felt alone with his thoughts for once. It always seemed there was someone else, some voice he didn’t quite recognize whispering words that could have come from any mouth or sour mind, generic and yet thoroughly hurtful. But now, wrapped in familiar arms, the steady thrum of Alfred’s heartbeat in the back of his mind, he felt as though he faced a curious sort of mirror, looking back to the boy in the suit and the thousand other boys he’d been over the years.

Peter stood there, fading into the shimmering sunlight of that evening until the exact line of his smile and the glimmer of his eyes blurred into nothing but a feeling.

Florence hovered in the mirror, too, her expression that of a woman holding her head high amongst a hurricane. Something akin to shame twisted in his gut at the sight of her, for experience played him as the cause of her set jaw and cold stare.

He wondered what she would think if she saw him curled in the arms of another – and a man, nonetheless – and if she would give him that curt, resigned nod he knew so well.

God, what was he doing? Just months had passed since that night, and now he was throwing himself into something entirely new and breathtaking and wonderful and oh, he was really quite hopeless. Helpless, hopeless, whatever other words he could assign the feeling of weightless inevitability that had claimed him since that night at Ciro’s – they all fell to pieces beneath the heavy cloud pressing down upon him. Alfred and his deceptively angelic smile was more alluring than anything had ever been before, and it really wasn’t helpful that he was splendidly kind and whip-smart and witty and kissed as though he was trying to rip every shred of oxygen from Edward’s lungs –

But it was too soon. Too soon to date, too soon to kiss and definitely too soon to fall in love.

Of course, that raised the question as to why he’d agreed to Peel’s stupid plan in the first place, if he didn’t want a relationship. Had he been planning on being so cruel? The mirror distorted, mercury rushing to and fro and mutating his image into something far less human than he felt.

And then Alfred was mumbling something nearly unintelligible into Edward’s curls and he remembered the natural sway of their banter and the way they traded smiles and kisses with ease and he knew why again.

 

They stayed entangled for far too long to be anything but horrendously cheesy, whispering sweet nothings and tracing small patterns into each other’s hands and cheeks and arms. Alfred fell asleep in Edward’s unmade bed halfway through a slow conversation about literature or something equally abstract. Edward watched him for a long minute before climbing into bed beside him, brushing his fingers through Alfred’s hair and wondering whether the day had been real at all.

 

•••

 

Alfred was hardly awake the next morning, much less prepared for the barrage of questions flung his way the moment he walked into the Buckingham. He and Edward had parted ways in the lobby, Alfred armed with some of Edward’s smaller clothes and hope that Mina had gotten his texts and brought his laptop to the office. They’d shared a quick peck before Victoria caught sight of them through the doors, shock giving way to pure mischievous intent, so Edward had dashed off and Alfred had tried to steady himself before dealing with whatever came next. Of course, he was never going to be prepared for anything Victoria threw at him, so he felt exhaustion settling into his bones the instant he walked into the office.

“So that’s him? Really? He looks young.”

Alfred shrugged and dropped his coat over his desk chair on the way to the break room. “He’s older than me, actually, just by a year.”

Victoria gave him a pointed look and went to join Albert at his desk, leaving Alfred to wander up to get coffee on his own.

“So,” Harriet said, leaning against the counter beside the sink, where Ernst scrubbed at a mug. Her arms were folded expectantly across her chest, and Alfred froze in the doorway.

“…Yes?”

“Mina says you didn’t come home on Sunday. At all.”

Ernst whistled and Alfred groaned, falling into one of the chairs along the wall and running his hands over his face. “It’s really not that big of a deal. We just talked all day and it made sense for me to stay the night.”

“Sure, sure,” Harriet teased. “Anyway, meeting with me at ten to review your article. The Duchess wants all the drafts in for Friday, and then we’ll revise next week and push it out at the end of the month. And you _still_ haven’t voted on a damn cover design!” She was gone in a moment, the young Uber-driver intern at her heels, and Alfred muttered an ‘okay’ to the closed door.

“She’s a hurricane,” Ernst said with a distant fondness.

Alfred snorted. “That’s one way to put it.”

Ernst gave him a thumbs-up as he followed Harriet, stepping aside to let Mina through. She waited until the door clicked shut before announcing, with startling confidence, “They’re fucking.”

“They’re in love.”

Mina shrugged and dropped into the chair beside Alfred’s. “I’m gonna tag along to your draft meeting, if that’s okay. I want to hear about everything.”

“There’s nothing to hear about!”

“You’re telling me you went over to his house for, like, thirty-six hours, and got absolutely nothing for the article.”

“I tried, but he’s too… too _good_ for me to be horrible to him.”

“Well, then, what did you do? Non-article related, I mean.”

Alfred smiled at the memories of the past few days. “Well, we absolutely fucked –,”

“– I really don’t need to hear about that –,” Mina interrupted, retching.

“– and then we just talked, really. And cuddled and tried to make an omelet and I maybe told him I loved him but that’s beside the point –.”

Mina made a strange guttural coughing noise and grabbed at Alfred’s shoulder. “You _what_? When did that happen?”

“That’s a really good question, actually,” Alfred said, rather nervously. Mina yanked him around by his arm so he was forced to meet her eyes for a moment, but, unexpectedly and thankfully, she didn’t make him try to explain anything. Instead, she just sighed and gave him a sad smile, heavy and unexplainable.

“The Duchess will be making her rounds soon, so you might want to go do work.”

Alfred groaned and rose stiffly, still coffee-less and suffering from some extreme emotional whiplash. Mina gave him a reassuring pat (or, really, slap) on the back and shoved him lightly towards the hallway.

 

“So you have nothing,” Harriet said, deadpan and staring into Alfred’s eyes long enough to make him squirm.

“Not… _nothing_. Just not a lot.”

“He’s got nothing,” Mina confirmed, tucking her legs up onto the couch while Alfred anxiously scrolled up and down his document and up and down again and again and again –

There really wasn’t anything. Nothing at all. It was all stupid stuff, things that the Duchess would roll her eyes at, things that Mina would do by accident and things that were uninteresting and unfocused and oh, God, he really did have a lot of editing to do.

Mina must have noticed his fidgeting and gently pressed the toe of her boots against his leg. “You could always fake it.”

Harriet nodded while Alfred glanced around furtively. The Duchess had a habit of popping out from behind potted plants and publicly shaming insolent employees. “You’re good enough.”

Alfred bit his lip and tapped across the keys, reading the shitty little tidbits he’d jotted down about every incident, if he could even call them that.

The guitar scheme had gone awry and he hadn’t taken the chance with Florence, leaving nothing of real substance to write about, but it seemed a waste to leave his exploits over the weekend in the dust. Alfred gulped.

Mina leaned forward to watch over his shoulder as he began to type. He’d drafted the guitar plan with her before he left for Edward’s on Saturday, leaving nothing to write but the Florence story.

_Step Seven: Snoop_

And it was satisfying. It was a relief to start writing fiction and nothing more, the plot coming naturally. A name dropped carelessly in the midst of a late night conversation and a picture tucked beneath another and an early morning hunt through photo albums in search of a mysterious ex. Alfred had never felt so at ease, not for ages, and the words came quickly. It was perhaps his greatest bit yet, and as Mina chanted the paragraphs off to Harriet, Alfred’s confidence grew. He finished the draft quickly and sat, thinking, for a moment.

A wicked and wonderful thought came to mind. “Mina, what’s the absolute stupidest thing you’ve done with a boy?”

She glanced up from his laptop. “I tried to make out with him in a movie theatre and got us kicked out, and then he tried to argue with some guy about it and got punched in the face.”

“You didn’t even have to think about that, did you?” Harriet said after a pause, somewhere between horror and awe. Alfred grinned and began to write again, inventing along the way.

Harriet had caught on, sitting forward in her seat with a conspiratorial gleam in her eye. “You’re gonna fake it?”

“I’m gonna fake it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for reading!! and, as always, thank you to my wonderful beta, otter/clarameansbright, for shakespearean exploits and lowkey fake dating for hilarity purposes. 
> 
> anyway thanks again for suffering through this adventure with me. this fandom is honestly my lifeblood


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'hey maddie', you may be saying, 'why the fuck haven't you posted for a month'
> 
> excellent question. i have no sufficient answer. this isn't even a super long chapter or anything i'm just a Lazy Bitch.
> 
> (but chapters 10 and 11 should be up pretty soon :p) sorry for the obnoxiously long wait!

_ Step Eight: Be Obnoxious _

_ Step Nine: Get Him in Trouble _

_ Step Ten: Be Generally Embarrassing _

_ Step Eleven: Be Hot-and-Cold _

_ Step Twelve: Be Disastrous _

_ Step Thirteen: Be Jealous _

_ Step Fourteen: Invite a Friend Along _

_ … _

 

•••

 

Florence stood at the bulletin board in the break room, halfway raised onto her toes, pinning a slip of garishly pink paper amongst the flyers and stray business cards and snapshots of various dogs from when Edward had tried to kickstart a ‘pet of the week’ competition in a halfhearted attempt to brighten the office.

“What’s that for?” Edward said, leaning awkwardly against the counter and ducking behind his coffee mug when Florence turned towards him.

“Gala on Friday. The annual one? That Peel’s been yapping about for weeks? He didn’t give me the flyer until today though,” Florence grumbled bitterly.

“Ah,” Edward said, a sense of unbidden apprehension rising in his gut. Peel wanted his report on Thursday, so it only seemed natural to bring Alfred to the gala and back up his writing, given, of course, that he had something to actually turn in. He’d started the document a billion times, but nothing felt  _ right _ . There were no words to describe the instinctive spontaneity of the past week, no way to put the swelling feeling of warmth and adoration in Edward’s heart down on paper.

Florence was looking at him oddly, as if he had suddenly sprouted a second head or was morphing into a dandelion, and he forced a grin to appease her, but only succeeded in making her eyes narrow. “What in the world is going on with you lately?”

She had always been able to see through him, except for when it mattered most. Or perhaps Florence had always known that their relationship was a lie, a figment of the imaginations of their fathers, and had simply chosen to ignore it all in favor of keeping pretenses… Edward shook himself. Theorizing about that mess was pointless. He was done with fabricating explanations for unexplainable things; the sins committed by the boy in the suit would forever be a mystery and he had to be okay with that. The world of his and Florence’s relationship was strange and endless, full of paper-thin words clouding true intentions and hearts, and as much as he had torn the world apart on that fateful night, there was no point in burning the rest of their fragile peace. It was better to leave the screens up, protecting what was left of their secrets.

But what mattered now was the way Florence was trying to peer into his mind in the break room. Edward realized he had yet to answer her, but there was also no answer to give her, so he stayed silent and shrugged. Florence sighed and gestured towards the door with an incline of her head.

“Let’s take a walk.”

Edward had told Peel they were going to duck out to talk for a minute, and considering the wink and thumbs-up he’d been given as well as the heat of eyes on their backs as they left, he and Florence were probably being spied on from the office windows above. Their breakup had been the scandal of the century for their coworkers, if only because of the sudden awkward silence between them. Edward flinched, remembering the weeks they’d spent avoiding each other at all costs, making carefully coordinated visits to the break room and copier and staggering the times they arrived and left, some sad and intricate tango, their movements scrutinized by a dozen curious onlookers.

He blinked out of memories and onto the street again, arms folded tightly around his chest in the wind.

Florence steered him into the entrance to an alleyway, running her hands up and down her forearms and scrunching up her nose at the questionable odor emanating from the dumpster down the way.

“I still haven’t found your necklace,” Edward started, attempting a smile and finding that it didn’t feel false.

Florence laughed. “It was an ugly one anyway. Mom’s never had good taste in jewelry. Or gifts, really. I hate wearing necklaces.”

“I feel like there’s so much I still don’t know about you,” Edward sighed, shaking his head a little and watching pedestrians scurry by their alley, heads ducked into the wind and coat collars popped up to shield their cheeks. The city felt welcoming, almost, even in the gray light and the increasingly sharp gale, and Edward couldn’t help but think that there was something about Alfred that was making things better, somehow.

Florence tilted her head to follow Edward’s gaze to the street, an incredulous look of realization flashing across her face. “I hardly know you either. How is that?”

“I really couldn’t tell you. We never talked about anything.”

“Stubbornness? Silent rebellion?”

“Against our parents or ourselves?”

Florence laughed at that and glanced back to meet Edward’s eyes. “So, are we friends, then? Or can we try to be?”

“Definitely.”

Of course they could be friends. Edward had spent years upon years with her, too upset with himself or his father or Florence to really try to talk to her.

But that was behind them now and he could tell her things,  _ real _ things, not just superficial factoids about his life or his day or his mood… things like how much he was missing Josephine or that he was worried about his mother or that he  _ loved _ Alfred, maybe, the sort of love that made all the wasted time of his youth okay, because there was a future to fill instead.

Happiness welled in his chest and he had to breathe carefully for a moment to keep from blurting it all out at once.

Florence was watching him with fond concern. “You look like you have something to tell me.”

“You said you had something to hear.”

“I did, indeed.”

Edward grinned. “Well, how long do you think Peel will let us disappear for?”

Hours later, finally settled in a coffee shop decorated as if it came straight from one of the architecture magazines Peel had delivered to the office, they’d exhausted all conversation to a (wonderful) point of comfortable silence, Florence picking at the remains of a muffin and Edward feeling nearly weightless. Talking was far nicer than he thought it would be – first with Alfred, and now with Florence. And it was especially nice to talk about the other, because the Florence issue had been tearing him up more than he realized and Alfred… oh,  _ Alfred _ .

“You’re thinking about him again,” Florence said, grinning to herself. “I can tell. You’re blushing.”

“Excuse you, I do  _ not _ blush.”

“Tell me again about how skilled he is in the bedroom?” Florence asked innocently, batting her eyelashes.

A hot flush crept up to his cheeks and Edward buried his face in his hands while Florence snickered in triumph.

“You can’t spring that on me!”

“What, you were  _ very _ detailed earlier –,”

“– I was not!” Edward protested, peering out from behind his hands to scowl.

“You’re blushing too much to be convincingly upset and it’s absolutely wonderful,” Florence laughed. “And don’t be shy about it. We’re friends now, and friends tell each other stuff like that.”

Edward flushed darker at the thought of Alfred telling his friends about their nights together.

“Aha! There it is again!”

“Oh, shut up,” he grumbled, but the sight of Florence straining to keep from saying something far less innocent made them both dissolve into laughter, drawing pointed glares from the other customers scattered around the shop. Edward slunk lower in his seat and glanced at the time. They’d been gone for  _ ages _ , and, knowing his coworkers, they were probably starting to get ideas back at the office.

Florence, seemingly a mind reader, began to stand, dusting off her skirt and sighed. “Better head back before the rumor mill starts turning.”

“It’s been turning since we left.”

“Indeed,” Florence said, somewhere between resigned and resentful. Edward gestured towards the door in an echo of their awkward meeting in the break room, delighting in her clear recognition of the joke.  _ (They had an inside joke!) _

 

•••

 

The rest of Monday passed in a flurry of typing, with Ernst stopping by with mysteriously delicious cookies he refused to name the source of and a fresh batch of terrible ideas to put in the article, and Victoria perched on the arm of Harriet’s chair with a look of humorous disdain.

“You’re never getting away with this,” she said, shrugging, trying and failing to suppress a grin.

Ernst booed and flicked cookie crumbs at her, but Alfred found himself completely and entirely engrossed in writing. It was a familiar sort of haze, the kind he got when he used to write fiction in uni, the kind that meant his fingers were flying faster than he could think and he read it all over with a sort of curious enthrallment, for he hardly remembered anything he had written at all.

Mina read over his shoulder, glancing up every now and again to flash Harriet a look of vague approval.

Hours sped by in a blur, and eventually Ernst went back to doing his job (whatever that meant) and Harriet had to dash off to deal with some squabble amongst the interns, but Alfred hardly moved from the couch and Mina didn’t stir from her post by his side, eyes roaming over the pages and pages he typed.

“You’re going to have to edit this. Like, a  _ lot _ ,” she said, once Alfred had finally slowed, out of ideas and words to write.

“I’m having fun, though.”

“You should  _ not _ be writing the how-to segment,” Mina said, the tiniest bit of awe creeping into her voice.

“Oh, stop that. I’m no better than anyone else here.”

“That’s a lie and you know it.”

Alfred crinkled his nose and shut his laptop decisively, confident that he now had the rest of the week to pick it apart and joke around with Ernst, and probably (definitely) spend a few nights back at Edward’s, impressing him with his minimal cooking skills and doing indelicate things under his bedsheets.

“You’re thinking about sex,” Mina said matter-of-factly, standing and stretching languidly.

“Definitely not,” Alfred said, affronted, but the crack in his voice gave him away.

“Don’t try that with me; I can tell. You press your lips together and straighten up and get this funny look in your eye –.” She imitated while Alfred groaned and watched her parade around the sitting space from between his fingers, stopping only when Harriet walked over with her bag slung over her shoulder, clearly suppressing a laugh.

“I see you’re practicing Alfred’s sex look.”

Mina cheered in triumph while Alfred bemoaned them both, struggling to his feet and slipping away to his desk to grab his laptop case and get home as soon as possible, hoping that the Chinese takeaway place across the street from their flat hadn’t yet run out of spring rolls and that Mina and Harriet hadn’t exhausted their wine supply over the weekend.

As light as he was feeling, wine sounded absolutely  _ wonderful _ .

“You ready, old sport?” Harriet called, striding towards him with her trademark power-walk, Mina looking far too exuberant for such an exhausting day beside her.

He took a steadying breath, suddenly wanting nothing but to curl up and take a nap, preferably with some very specific company, and hefted his bag up onto his back. “Old sport? That’s a new one.”

Harriet threw him a grin, faltering in her step when she spotted Ernst hovering by the door. Alfred gave her a knowing look and waved goodbye, letting her slip off to join him without any hubbub. Mina watched them split off with an invested fondness, stopping beside Alfred’s desk and extending a hand.

“I’m thinking takeaway tonight, yeah?”

Alfred sighed happily, taking her proffered hand. “You know me  _ so _ well.”

Later that night, Harriet having gone AWOL and takeaway reduced to the onions Mina avoided like the plague and a chopstick broken during a fight over the last spring roll, Alfred’s phone buzzed.

“It’s Edward,” he said, more to himself than Mina and rather breathlessly.

Shielding his screen from Mina, who automatically started  _ ‘ooo’ _ -ing like a primary schooler and clambered onto his side of the couch to catch a glimpse of the message, he saw the beginning of a rather extensive paragraph. Mina saw it, too, it seemed.

“Oh my God, that looks like a breakup text,” she said quietly, snatching the words right from Alfred’s mind.

_ Shit _ , what if it had worked? But it wasn’t as if Alfred had done anything really horrible, so if Edward  _ were _ to end it, it would probably be on the basis of chemistry or some bullshit that thinly masked the true cause: Alfred. Or maybe it was moving too fast for Edward, or he didn’t like the way Alfred kissed, or he had told too much on Sunday and was feeling vulnerable, or –

“Stop overthinking it all and read it,” Mina whispered.

Alfred gulped, thrusting the phone into Mina’s hands. “I can’t, I can’t; I actually can’t.”

She glanced it over and settled back onto her heels while Alfred bit into the side of his thumb.

“ _ Hey, Alfred. Hope your coworker didn’t give you too much shit for the kiss this morning. I probably should have asked about PDA before I started kissing you in public, so sorry about that. In other news, my boss’s boss is hosting the annual fall gala on Friday and there’s room for me to bring a plus one. I know it’s soon, and you’d have to look like you walked right off Grosvenor Place, so if you don’t feel like trying to find a suit in the next few days it’s totally fine, but I also mean soon as in soon into… this. Can I call it a relationship? We probably should have talked about this too but oh well. Sorry; I’m rambling. But if you’re not comfortable with showing up as my date in front of all my coworkers, who are mostly dicks, fair warning, that’s okay. I don’t want to pressure you or anything because that sucks and _ – Jesus, Alfred, this is so sweet!” Mina paused to glance up at him, aghast in the best way possible.

Alfred felt suddenly choked up and could only nod dazedly. Edward seemed so apologetic and it was crushing (and crushingly adorable).

Mina started up again with renewed gusto. “-  _ because that sucks and I don’t want to ask you to do anything super public so early on into… this. I hope it’s okay to call it a relationship because I really, really want to. Crikey, I’m rambling. Anyway, I’d get you there because I’m a gentleman, dress code is meeting-the-Queen levels of proper, and it’s at seven. _ And then he says to please respond quickly because he has to RSVP soon. And sorry for the late notice. Something about his boss being ditzy and forgetting to let the office know the specifics until the last minute.”

“Holy shit,” Alfred said, stunned, feeling rather overwhelmed and very much giddy.

Mina looked up again, glowing with second-hand joy. “Alfred, you have to say yes. This boy is  _ beyond _ lovestruck.”

Alfred shook his head slowly, feeling rather stupid due to his inability to think of a coherent response other than  _ marry me right now you handsome fucker _ . “I wouldn’t dream of anything else.” He caught the phone deftly when Mina tossed it at him, scrambling to reread the message (or, essay, rather) again, mouthing the words to himself as if to prove they were real.

God, Edward really was an absolute dream. A puppy, too, it seemed – big doe eyes and persistent sincerity and all.

**ALFRED:** long story short yes, of course! and PDA is totally fine, and yes let’s call this a relationship, and also you’re adorable. and trust me, i can do fancy ;)

He sighed and dropped his head back onto the throw pillow pile behind him, grinning up at the ceiling and hugging himself a little in childish delight.

“Marry him,” Mina said sternly, and Alfred nodded happily.

 

•••

 

The rest of the week flew by, texting Florence intricate updates on his and Alfred’s text conversations and the cute things he did on their Wednesday lunch date (because, really, the way Alfred looked up at him from beneath his lashes was sinful), and calling Josephine for writing advice.

Thursday came quickly, and Edward handed Peel his report with satisfaction. Every last word was true, though heavily edited to be less gushy and more or less professional. Florence gave him an enthusiastic thumbs-up from over her computer and Edward grinned back, feeling rather giddy and entirely excited for the gala.

He left the door to his closet-sized office flung open, the vague chatter from the break room making the space feel warmer, somehow. His phone buzzed with a text from Alfred, something about grabbing something to eat after work to recover from a particularly drab meeting.

It was all starting to feel like normalcy, in the way Edward supposed it should have been long ago. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to my wonderful beta, otter/clarameansbright, for the 'right now you handsome fucker' line and for being an angel when i'm crying in the bathroom. you da bomb
> 
> thank you for reading and, if you so deem, leaving a comment! it means the world to me <33


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow, one month exactly since i last updated... i apologize for being the WORST at this lol. 
> 
> i thought it was fitting for me to post today for that very reason, which means that this is un-betad and very lightly edited (as in i read over it and ran it through my good pal grammarly), which may explain the excessive number of dashes i use throughout the last half of this. so, be prepared for an unholy number of dashes (and some angsttttt)
> 
> OH and before you continue, i highly suggest listening to 'when am i gonna lose you' by the local natives, which is a song that channels all the various energies of this chapter and fic in general. i listened to it for several hours on repeat while writing, if that speaks anything for its wonderfulness
> 
> p.s. i am incapable of writing arguments, but i hope this isn't too bad. now onwards!

_And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you lose a guy in ten days._

···

 

Alfred, whose coffee order was obnoxiously complicated and more than a little endearing, was watching Edward over the top of his mug as Edward mulled over his schedule, alternating between tapping his pen against the table top and chewing on it, brow furrowed in concentration. Rain pattered against the shop windows and the smattering of other customers were all absorbed in their books and laptops and notepads and phones.

Alfred was absorbed in Edward.

 

···

 

The sunset was gorgeous.

Alfred remarked this with fascination, as if he were seeing the sky lit up in fire for the first time. Edward wrapped an arm around his waist and they watched the violet and orange flicker across the pond, reflecting the heavens above.

Edward pressed his lips to Alfred’s temple, alone in the park as the sun sank below the rooftops and into the darkness.

 

···

 

“You remind me of him,” Edward whispered.

Alfred hummed, burying into the sheets. He hardly had to ask what Edward meant.

Edward was silhouetted against the darkness by the faint red glow of the Ciro’s sign across the street, just enough to guide Alfred’s hand as he reached to run his fingers through his soft curls.

“We’re different though,” he said. “Right?”

“Yeah,” Edward breathed. “We’re different.”

 

···

 

Edward, for his part, was feeling _very_ successful. He had a surprisingly steady friendship with Florence already and the _thing_ with Alfred was only getting better and better with time (he’d stopped being exceedingly awkward in their texts, which was nice). Peel had flashed him a wink when they all left the office on Friday, which Edward took to mean he had found his report immensely entertaining (which was hopefully a good thing).

And he was taking Alfred to Melbourne’s party, which would be an excellent way to introduce him to Peel and hopefully prove himself once more. He’d finish up his application over the weekend and submit it, and then…

Something had changed, and it was heralded by a gloriously happy feeling, one that Edward knew like the curves of Alfred’s body. One that seemed endless, until it wasn’t.

Josephine had yet again been his fashion consultant, and she watched his struggle into various sets of shirts and pants and blazers with the expression of someone watching a particularly bad reality show.

“You _really_ can’t wear brown with that red,” she said. Edward, who was fidgeting with the cuffs of his sleeves in front of the mirror, grumbled.

“But I _like_ the brown.”

“One or the other, Ed,” Josephine deadpanned.

Edward retched. “Ed? Since when have you called me ‘Ed’?”

“Since now, I guess. Didn’t you have a gray blazer? I swear you bought one as a graduation gift.”

He twisted and turned to check and see if the cowlick at the back of his head was misbehaving again. “Josie, you act as though I know what’s in my closet.”

Her eyes widened. “ _What_ did you just call me?”

Edward hid a grin and disappeared into his closet in order to avoid Josephine’s ire and search for the gray blazer. He was picking Alfred up in half an hour, which was really not enough time for him to get dressed, scrap the entire outfit and start over, take a swig of the whiskey he kept in the back of his cupboard for luck, and change his outfit again, which was how the evening was currently predicted to play out.

Edward bounced anxiously on his heels and pushed through his extensive sweater collection in search of the blazer.

Nerves bubbled hot in his stomach, though he didn’t have any _reason_ to be nervous. Alfred had been excited at the prospects of getting dressed up and sipping champagne, and maybe swinging back to Edward’s place later to get dressed _down_ and slip under the covers together… it had all the makings of a wonderful, memorable night.

And yet, he felt a deep unsettlement in his bones. He felt as though he were Romeo, hand on heart, _some consequence yet hanging in the stars_.

Edward shook himself a little and yanked the blazer out from its place squashed between the ugly Christmas sweater Josephine had gotten him years before and the wall, frowning at the wrinkles.

“Josephine, it’s wrinkled!” he called.

“Well, iron it then!”

Edward set out to try to find the iron, eyeing the kitchen clock as he passed it. Considering the drive, he only had fifteen minutes to pull himself together.

And, as Florence had kindly pointed out, he still needed to somehow explain to Alfred that he had written an essay on their romance. Edward, who had failed to consider the implications of, well, _everything_ , had quickly stamped down the notion. He’d have to figure it out someday, but so soon? It didn’t seem entirely necessary.

Edward found the iron (tucked in the far back of his broom closet where it should be, interestingly enough) and fueled small talk with Josephine to keep himself distracted. But, as she complained about the heat and her less-than-friendly landlord, he couldn’t keep from wandering into a thousand scenarios.

He’d explain it all calmly, for certain, with the aura his father had exuded when he doled out hard news. He’d listen to what Alfred had to say, he’d comfort him, he’d apologize… but what if Alfred was upset? Would he leave? Would he end things? Would he yell? Edward couldn’t bear to think of losing him so quickly, not just when he was sure they might last.

He accidentally brushed his finger against the searing pad of the iron and, cursing, pressed it to his mouth to ease the burn.

“Edward, goodness, what’s on your mind?”

“Nothing,” he said from around his finger, rather sheepish. He’d never been good at lying.

“So, something serious?” Josephine’s brow furrowed incredulously, but there was a hint of concern in her eyes that Edward found he knew all too well.

He grumbled. “It’s really nothing. I just hadn’t thought of what Alfred might think of my report.”

“Lucky for you, then, because I have.”

Edward nearly burned himself again in his rush to deposit the iron back in the closet and sit down to let Josephine lecture to him.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.

 

···

 

“I regret getting you that tie,” Harriet sighed, sipping a Manhattan (Mina, for all her social awkwardness, made a _mean_ Manhattan), and shifting around on the couch. “Now you try to put it with everything and it always looks horrible.”

“Why’d you buy me a horrible tie?” Alfred asked, twisting around to check if the back of his shirt was tucked in.

“For a _laugh_ , of course—”

“Oh, well, that’s kind of you—”

They were interrupted by a loud bang from the kitchen and a curse, which prompted Harriet to go check that Mina hadn’t broken her foot with a frying pan or something and left Alfred alone in the living room, standing awkwardly and trying to get comfortable in his suit and tie. Edward would be along any minute and he _really_ didn’t want to start the evening off on the wrong foot, which meant he had to hurry up and fix the tie situation. Or maybe he could go tie-less, just shirt and blazer, or was that too casual? Should he be wearing the tux he’d nicked from George last Christmas? Or was this a _bowtie_ event, which meant Alfred would need to run down to the shop on the corner and buy one before Edward showed up…

He triple-checked the back of his shirt and frowned at himself in the mirror over the side table, patting down a loose strand of hair. His cheeks flushed red in the lamplight and the shadows of his face carved a harsher portrait than he had ever seen, and he turned away quickly before he could read too much into it all.

Harriet returned from the kitchen, muttering about Mina’s perpetually lotioned hands and her subsequent inability to keep a grip on pots, and flopped aimlessly onto the couch. She paused, watching the way Alfred was shifting anxiously in front of the mirror again.

“What’s wrong, old sport?” she said, dropping her head over the edge of the couch to stare at him from upside-down.

Alfred smiled tightly. “Is that my nickname now?”

“Sure it is. Always has been.” After a moment’s hesitation, Harriet leveled him with a stiff stare, waiting for an answer.

He sighed and turned to face her. “And for the record, there’s nothing _wrong_. It’s gonna be a good night.” Alfred straightened his jacket again and turned to the mirror, dragging his teeth across his bottom lip roughly, again and again and again…

Harriet rolled off the couch, landing with impressive grace and striding over to drag Alfred away from his harsh reflection, hands firm but gentle. “I think the fact that you have to reassure yourself means that it’s not.”

She pushed him down onto the couch, tutting when he moved to stand and pace again, and flinging her legs across her lap when she sat for emphasis. Alfred tilted his head onto the back of the couch and stared up at the ceiling.

How _could_ he describe the deep-seated feeling of discontent, the sensation that he was standing on a wire, ever so close to safety but also halfway to falling? His heart beat faster for Edward than it ever had before and he longed for the touch of his lips and hands every second of the day, and yet the prospect of this evening, this marker of their budding relationship, made his stomach rock with nerves.

Words felt worthless. He swallowed. “I just feel uneasy. Something’s bound to happen soon.”

Harriet sighed. “Mm, good luck.”

“What, no words of wisdom?” he asked, a short and mostly ironic burst of laughter breaking the sudden tension of the room.

Harriet shook her head fondly and reached out to push at the reoffending piece of hair. “You’re in a strange situation, you know.”

“Yeah,” Alfred breathed, trying to quell the surge of nausea in his gut. “Yeah, I know.”

 

Edward texted him that their taxi was waiting at the curb, and Alfred bound from the apartment building with a last minute good-luck swat from Harriet, darting down the steps and sliding neatly into the backseat alongside Edward, who cushioned his trajectory towards the opposite door with ease.

“Good evening,” he said cheerfully. Alfred snorted and shifted into the middle seat so he could keep himself pressed against Edward’s side, glancing up to meet his eyes and immediately halting, thoughts hitching and heart rate simultaneously coming to an abrupt stop and racing uncontrollably. 

“You look nice,” Alfred breathed after a moment. Edward smiled crookedly and reached out to lace his fingers with Alfred’s.

“Not as nice as you.”

Alfred was half tempted to lunge for a kiss (or drop to his knees; either way was fine), but judging by the driver’s piercing silence, the motion was unwelcome. He settled for a quick peck on the cheek and focused on the storefronts speeding by, leaning into Edward’s side. It felt like returning to familiarity at last, settling against strong arms and feeling warm breath ghost across the top of his head as they drove.

Edward whispered something about how the driver was eyeing them suspiciously and Alfred muffled a laugh, more at home than ever.

 

···

 

Edward was immensely happy that he had invited Alfred to the soiree. They sat at a table with Peel, who was distractedly pushing at his potatoes while he watched Alfred chat with Florence (amicably, thank God) and sip wine.  The hall Melbourne had rented was sweeping, with high ceilings and circles of white-clothed tables set with china. It was an evening fit for a ballgown, in a room fit for a prince. Alfred seemed to understand this, and he drew his shoulders back with confidence. He’d slipped into the role effortlessly, laughing and throwing out light quips when appropriate, eyes never quite meeting anyone’s, even Edward’s. For the first half of the meal, Edward was satisfied in his decision, glad to have Alfred’s ease to balance out his own awkward and aimless demeanor (parties had never been his forte).

As champagne flowed and the night stretched on, Edward became disconcerted with the mask Alfred kept in his back pocket. He glanced down to find himself picking anxiously at a loose thread on his suit. He felt two sets of eyes on him instantly, and he knew Peel was following his each and every movement, wary and intrigued. Alfred, who somehow understood quite instantaneously that Edward was upset, slipped a hand over his own and whispered a proposition in his ear.

“Should we get away for a moment?” His voice was soft and comforting, familiar and warm.

Edward smiled and flicked his gaze out from under his lashes, finding Alfred’s eyes there, raw and purely his own. “Sure.”

Peel coughed loudly across the table and struck up a sudden lively conversation with a harsh-looking old woman on his left, winking at Edward from behind the floral centerpiece as they rose. Approval. Alfred took Edward’s hand and they slipped away from the table, using a swell of music as a cover to dart up the stairs at the back of the soaring hall to the upper walk and duck out onto a balcony.

Cool night air washed over them and Alfred darted forward for a hug, burying his face in Edward’s chest.

“Are you okay?” he asked, voice muffled against Edward’s suit jacket.

“I am now.” Edward looked out over the city, glistening indigo and gold in the early hours of the night, darkness pooling on the horizon where the light of the patchwork streets faded into the countryside. He could see everything from this high balcony on the edge of town — perhaps that was the red glow of the Ciro’s sign far off to the right or the soft green of the Buckingham Magazine’s sign to the left. He thought he saw the Almeida theatre, now home to the memories of Twelfth Night, and the block that housed the little café they’d had lunch at on Wednesday, and the building where Alfred shared a flat with Mina, and the hipster restaurant they’d tested out for dinner the other day… memories, scattered around London, and only from the past two weeks. Edward sighed and pressed his lips against Alfred’s curls. “You scared me back there, a little. You didn’t seem like _you_.”

“’m sorry,” he murmured, and Edward hushed him.

“Don’t be sorry.”

They held each other until the song that had struck up when they left faded out, leaving the balcony eerily silent but for the wind.

Alfred stepped back to run his eyes over Edward’s face, seemingly searching for something telling, something that might explain his sudden discomfort at the table, but smiled when he found nothing.

He was beautiful in the darkness, soft glow from the hall lighting his face in gold, hair glimmering in the mix between pale orange and deep blue, eyes shadowy but earnest as he pulled Edward to the railing to look over the city. Edward studied the streets again, picking out more and more memories from each night and each day with Alfred and tucking them away to treasure for as long as he could.

“I can see the Almeida. Where we saw Twelfth Night,” Alfred whispered, nearly relevantly, pointing towards the building with a strange nostalgia in his eyes. Edward turned from the city to watch him, eyes tracing the line of his profile and the curl of hair at the back of his head.

“I see it,” he said, and Alfred seemed to sense something in his voice that made him turn, a spark of mischief in his eyes.

“You’re not all that interested in the city, are you?” he teased.

Edward laughed and reached out to brush a strand of hair from Alfred’s eyes. “Oh, there are better things to look at.”

And somehow, lips met lips and Edward felt a surge of something instinctual that made him pull Alfred against him, kissing with a slow rhythm and wandering hands in the light of the hall, a brisk wind whipping through their hair and making the warmth of each other all the more comforting.

Alfred pulled back gently, the unreadable fog in his eyes long since gone, leaving nothing but affection. He ran a thumb across Edward’s lips and rose on his toes to press their lips together once more, something searing in his confident movements. Edward shivered, either from the wind or something very different, but the sounds of voices on the upper walk brought their attention back to reality.

“Should we go back down?” Edward suggested.

Alfred frowned. “Are you sure? You don’t have to.”

“I really should,” he sighed. “I have to woo Melbourne into giving me a job.”

 

···

 

Alfred made small talk while Edward chatted with who he assumed to be Melbourne and his snotty secretary, who was watching Edward with something between jealousy and disdain and made Alfred feel protective.

Robert Peel puttered up to him eventually, a portly man with obvious intelligence clouded by champagne, judging by the amount he had downed earlier during the main meal. Alfred had heard too many stories from Edward to take him seriously.

“You must be Mr. Paget!” he exclaimed, clamping a hand on Alfred’s shoulder. “I’ve heard _so_ much about you.”

Alfred winced at the weight of Peel’s meaty palm. “You have?”

“Ah, yes! Yes, the most romantic meeting at — what was it, Charlie’s? Circe’s?”

The wine on Peel’s breath wasn’t the only thing churning in Alfred’s stomach.

“And then going home with him! When I was your age, that sort of thing would have never been acceptable. If it had been — goodness, I would have been sleeping around right and left!”

He nodded slowly, half-dazed and feeling as though he was going to be sick. How in the world could Peel know what seemed like _everything_? Alfred gulped.

Peel flapped his hands at some imaginary resistance from Alfred. “Yes, yes, and then you turned up at our offices — Angela told me about that, our receptionist, you know. Quite a bit of confidence you’ve got there, young man!”

Alfred pulled from Peel’s grip, head swimming. “I’m sorry, Mr. Peel, but I really must be going—.”

“Oh, so soon? Such a shame! Well, I hope to be seeing you again. Perhaps next time Twelfth Night is put on, eh?” Peel jabbed his elbow into Alfred’s side in what he assumed was supposed to be a joking movement but turned out to be rather bruising. Alfred pulled farther away, feeling as though he were going to suffocate on the stench of Peel’s drunken breath and the starched tablecloths. He strode towards the doors, trying to appear as normal as he could, walking the perimeter of the room to avoid drawing attention. He was rather surprised he hadn’t stumbled, given the way his vision was clouding over in confusion and that the horrible sinking feeling in his gut was growing with every second.

In the corner of his eye, he could see Edward breaking away from his conversation to hurry after him, brow furrowed in concern. Alfred couldn’t help but walk faster, needing _air_.

He pushed past the heavy door and onto the front steps, hit suddenly with the air he’d been needing, except he couldn’t breathe and it lodged in his throat and he felt sick again.

His step faltered at last and he dropped onto a stone bench along the covered front walk of the building, the wall behind him cool and unforgiving. At least he could breathe now.

He needed to think. To try and piece together why in the world Peel seemed to know intimate details about Edward’s relationship with him — the only logical explanation was that Edward had _told_ him, which was not only the worst concept ever, but entirely unlike him. Given the way Edward complained about Peel’s incompetence, there was no reason for him to be relaying his personal life to him.

Especially when his personal life was also _Alfred’s_ personal life.

He took a steady breath and closed his eyes against the night.

The doors opened with surprising vigor, nearly knocking over a potted plant and forcing Alfred to peek out from under his lashes to see who it was. Light spilled out, framing Edward’s figure against the warmth of the hall. He looked around quickly, seemingly anxious. “Alfred?”

_Shit_.

“Alfred, what’s wrong?” The worry in his voice was biting. If Edward was going to continue being _perfect_ when Alfred only wanted to be upset with him, this was going to be far nastier than it should be.

Footsteps approached his bench and Alfred folded his arms over his chest, the tips of his fingers burning from where he had dug them into the rough edge of the stone.

“Hey, baby, what’s going on?” His voice was soft and concerned, as if he were biting back panic and covering it with a weak layer of sympathy. He knew something had happened. Alfred could feel it.

Alfred wanted so desperately to lean into Edward’s side, to bury his head into the curve of his neck and nuzzle at the soft underside of his jaw, except some sliver of bitterness had wormed its way into his chest and he held back. He gulped.

“Peel sure knows a lot about our sex life.”

Edward’s breath hitched, his hands freezing where they had come to rest beside Alfred’s thigh.

Alfred held his breath as the silence dragged on, the lack of response sawing through his heart like a blunt knife. The darkness felt heavy, heavier than the weight of Edward’s hand or the press of his lips or the heat of his gaze. Alfred dug his nails into his arms.

“I can explain,” Edward said at last, voice a carefully constructed semblance of strong.

“That’s the _worst_ answer you could have given me,” Alfred whispered.

 Edward swung down from the bench to his knees, fingers pressed white against the cool stone. His eyes were somehow wide and narrow all at once, pleading and defensive already, as if something decisive had occurred, something that had wounded him grievously… Alfred bit the inside of his cheek to keep from reaching out to cup Edward’s face in his hands, to cradle him and comfort him and wipe the look of desperation from his face.

And yet… _Peel_ knew about them. He knew about the moments Alfred had never detailed to anyone, even Mina, because something told him they were too rare and precious to sully with mere words, to leave anywhere but the deepest crevice of his heart, of _Edward’s_ heart. Shouldn’t it be the same for him? Shouldn’t Edward have felt that swelling and uncontainable sense of importance and known to keep those nights and days and hours and minutes and seconds tucked away in his memory?

Alfred curled his fingers tighter and felt crescent bruises begin to spring across his biceps despite the layers of fabric between them.

Edward took a great breath, steadying himself. Something about the renewed panic in his eyes told Alfred that he had noticed the way Alfred was folding in on himself. “Alfred, please, you’ve got to hear me out. Peel just wanted to see that I had some experience getting actual results in the field—.”

Fury, hot and white and blinding, burst open in Alfred’s chest and splintered through his vision so that Edward’s face and the naïve honesty it displayed were distorted into the face of an enemy. “In the _field_?” he cried. “Am _I_ the field?”

Edward stumbled onward, his words falling into one another and blurring his speech into a great mass of sincerity and emptiness.

“—and I planned on it just being that but it was so much _more_ , Alfred, you turned out to be so much more than I expected—.” He froze, soulful brown eyes darting anxiously across Alfred’s face. “God, please don’t look at me like that,” he whispered.

“Like _what_? Like I’m angry?” Alfred stood abruptly, jostling Edward enough so that he fell sideways for a moment. “I think I have the right to be angry.”

Edward scrambled to his feet and reached out towards Alfred, who had begun to march towards the stairs, praying there was a taxi nearby that could sweep him away from the hall and Peel and Edward’s faltering words of desperation. “Alfred, _please_ , listen for a little while.”

Something in his voice made Alfred freeze.

“And then you can… you can go or stay or whatever, just as long as you know the truth,” Edward continued with a sigh, sounding defeated.  

Alfred clenched his fists so that matching curves of crimson bloomed across his palms, and then slowly let go. “Fine. Ten minutes.”

Edward snorted bitterly. “Ten _days_.”

Alfred’s breath stilled in his lungs. It _couldn’t_ be…

“Peel gave me ten days to make someone fall in love with me. I was hoping to move up to work with Melbourne — you know that already, though — and he offered to give me the opportunity to add some more experience to my resume, and I took it.” There was no semblance of falsehood in his voice, no tinge of a lie, and Alfred wondered if he was overreacting.

Edward let out a slow sigh, sounding nearly wistful. “And then I met you and forgot about it all until that night, with the guitar, when you said… when you said _that_.”

Alfred nearly turned at the pure longing in Edward’s voice.

“And then I waited until I was absolutely sure that I might… might want to say _that_ back, and then I wrote it all up in one evening and turned it in and _that’s_ how Peel knows anything at all.” He paused for a brief moment, just enough to fuel a sour laugh before he continued. “I didn’t tell him about the sex, though, I swear. I think he just guessed on that.”

The night seemed to turn towards them, the wind seemed to hold its breath, as if the whole city were waiting on tenterhooks to see what happened next.

Alfred turned, feeling oddly calm, because it all made sense and yet it made no sense at all and he was really overreacting and yet this was a betrayal, a betrayal like no other except the one Alfred had committed, the one Alfred had yet to tell Edward of, the one that made him the villain and the one that made the righteous figure he was trying to cut nothing but a sham.

He narrowed his eyes at his own stupidity.

Edward made a noise like a kicked puppy. “Alfred, _please_ , don’t look at me like that.”

Alfred huffed. “Like _what_?”

“Like…

A thousand possibilities arose from the thousand emotions swirling in Alfred’s chest. _Like I’m upset? Like I’m waiting for time to turn back so we can start again? Like… like I love you? Like I want to run to you and never turn back? Like I want to go home with you and never leave and live in your light forever?_

“…like you’re mad at me,” Edward finished, shoulders sagging. “I’m sorry. I should have told you and… if you don’t hate me too much, maybe we could try again, and I’ll be completely and totally honest with you about _everything_.”

_Everything._ The word echoed through Alfred’s mind like a church bell. God, if only Edward knew who he was looking at with such downtrodden hope, such sadness and regret… Alfred felt as though he was going to throw up.

“Edward, I—,” he started, words escaping him as Edward’s eyes raised from the ground to meet Alfred’s, his face lined with something between longing and shame. Alfred let out a huff. “I don’t hate you. I could _never_. I was just upset, and yeah, it sucks that you didn’t tell me sooner and that you did it at all, but I’m not mad because it means I met _you_.”  

Edward took a small step forward, unbridled happiness rising into his face and breaking into a smile. Alfred felt like sinking into the granite below his feet, felt like he was dropping lower by the second, falling further from Edward’s shining light by the second. He didn’t deserve any of that happiness. Edward’s happiness should not come from _him_.

He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Edward, I’ve not been honest with you either. And you’ll have far more reasons to hate me than the other way around once I’m done.”

“Alfred, what—?”

Alfred twisted his hands together nervously. “I never told you what my project for the upcoming issue is…”

Edward, for all his brilliance, stood bewildered for several long moments before the realization fell upon him like a cold rain. “You wrote about us too?”

“I — kind of?”

He laughed suddenly before clasping a hand over his mouth to keep from drawing attention from the partygoers inside. “No way! That’s the oddest coincidence, oh my goodness!”

Alfred flinched. “It’s not quite the same.”

Edward blinked. “I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand—?”

Alfred closed his eyes. “My article is called ‘how to lose a guy in ten days.’”

 

···

 

So it was happening anyway.

Edward had lost him, even though he seemed to understand the Peel situation. Even though he thought they might pull through, Edward had somehow stumbled and let Alfred slip through his fingers.

His mind went numb.

“You were trying to — to _—_?”

Alfred screwed his eyes tighter, as if he could not bear to look at him at all.

Edward laughed breathlessly. “You were acting? This whole time? All the… the good things?”

His eyes sprung open. “The good things? No, no, Edward, just the bad things—.”

Something had snapped, and the wind felt as though it were crowding Edward into a corner, alone with his mind and all the insecurities that had whipped free.

“You were… this was…”

_A lie?_ Alfred had been testing him out, checking for all his faults and picking them to shreds from which to carve words. He had stuck around to see what else Edward could do wrong. He had pretended to want what Edward wanted, to want to trace his fingers across Edward’s body and into his mind, to want to learn him inside and out. He had faked it, and now Edward was little but a fool in a suit, swindled into believing that Alfred, an angel like Alfred, would actually want him. Alfred had searched for every little thing that turned him off, turned him away, when Edward thought he was searching for the real Edward, hidden beneath layers upon layers of plaster statues of the Edwards people wanted to see.

He felt sick, like he had the first time he’d taken the ferry to Ireland, when the wind-churned waters had rocked his stomach and sent his balance flailing.

Edward blinked back into reality to find Alfred’s eyes wide upon him, glassy blue and beautiful.

“Edward, I’m sorry, I—.”

“I have to go now, sorry, I’ve got an — an early morning tomorrow and I should sleep—,” Edward stammered, backing away slightly, embarrassment flooding his veins.

Alfred lunged forward suddenly, catching Edward’s hand and looking up at him frantically, and _oh_ was he beautiful. “Edward, please wait, let me _explain_.”

“I have to think, I have to go, I’m sorry,” Edward said, nearly pleading, though for what he didn’t know, and pulled his hand free. Something flashed through Alfred’s eyes, something akin to anger.

“You’re not perfect either, you know!” Alfred burst out, an unfamiliar edge in his voice. “You wrote that — that _report_ about me and sometimes I think that I’m just a replacement for your dead boyfriend and—.” His face fell.

The world was spinning and Edward felt something clawing at his insides, trying to crawl free and drag him far, far away from it all.

In the back of his mind he heard Alfred call a desperate apology _(I didn’t mean that, Edward, I’m sorry!)_ , but Edward was walking away, head held high and shoulders strong in the way his father’s had always been, in the way he had always been told they should be.

He needed to breathe, but there was no air fit for him when Alfred was near.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> edward is a dumbass who has the whole article backwards. alfred is a dumbass who overreacts. they are idiots and i love them. 
> 
> a spiritual thank you to my wonderful beta otter, because even though i didn't send this to you, you were sending me brie larson gifs while i wrote it, which is basically the same thing. 
> 
> (also sorry lol)


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's finally here y'all
> 
> (this was written entirely to declan mckenna's 'in blue', which i highly suggest as a mood for this chapter and also just as a bop)
> 
> i don't know how to feel about this chapter tbh. it's kind of messy because i'm awful at wrapping up plot threads but i hope it's passable and somewhat enjoyable XD

**_Alfred:_ ** _Edward I’m sorry_

 

···

 

Afterwards was strange.

Alfred felt as though he were swimming in honey, his limbs stiff and a permeating dizziness seeping through the spaces between his cells. He’d never considered the afterwards — some naïve piece of him figured he’d avoid all the fallout and sink so far into himself that the world blurred, or that everything would just stop, cut neatly with a sharp knife, or, even more unrealistically, that Edward would be okay with the game Alfred had played.

But rather, watching Edward walk away left everything hanging, cold and empty and reaching.

He sent a single text and then turned his phone off.

He got home somehow, waiting for a bus and shivering at the curbside in a haze of memories and replays, focusing in on every flashing look and biting word they’d thrown at each other. Alfred pressed his temple to the grimy bus window and traced the outlines of Edward’s phantom hands on his own, a sudden and powerful urge to cry overcoming him.

The journey from the bus stop to his apartment felt like a walk towards the end of a plank, for he knew that any semblance of composure or indifference would disintegrate the moment he crossed the threshold. He hardly bothered to fumble with his keys before giving up and knocking, the rush of it all simmering into exhaustion.

Mina answered the door, bleary-eyed and wrapped in her duvet, saw his trembling bottom lip, and immediately shoved him onto the couch.  

“Stay there,” she commanded, marching off to the kitchen to rummage around for a chocolate bar to share.

Alfred sunk into the sofa gladly, burrowing his face into the throw pillows, glad that Mina was echoing the routine usually reserved for her frequent and disastrous breakups. Chocolate and terrible TV sounded as close to excellent as anything could possibly get when Edward was gone, when Alfred had lost him.

Regret and guilt oozed over his skin and Alfred felt like curling up into himself like a pill bug until he could shut out the pounding in his head, wondering where it all went wrong.

It was wrong from the beginning. The article was wrong, and the urge to go to his laptop and delete the whole file was nearly enough to tug him from his spot tucked in the warmth of the pillows. He was wrong to choose a guy he actually liked — stomaching a sleazebag for little more than a week was nothing, not in the face of tormenting Edward.

And then again he had not tormented him, not in the way he was supposed to. He was half-assing every item on his list.  He hardly had enough material to write about anyway, so he may as well have told Edward right away. There had been no point in hiding or lying to him.

So many ways he could have gone right, and yet there he was, slipping under the duvet with Mina so they could sit in silence until he’d bit back the tears enough for them to stay there, head tucked against her chest as some shitty late night talk show flickered to life.

 

Alfred woke on the couch, still in his blazer and clutching a handful of Mina’s shirt. Sunlight splintered around the edges of the blinds and broke through the thin material of the duvet, making Alfred blink against the sharp brightness.

Mina murmured as she dreamed, and Alfred pushed closer against her, an aching sense of déjà vu sending him tumbling back into the depth of memory, the passing sensation of cool sheets and warm arms and soft kisses against his forehead enveloping him for a brief moment of happiness.

And then he remembered.

_“Shit.”_

Mina stirred above him, and Alfred froze, not quite wanting to break the peace of the moment, even as a storm of emotions rose in his chest and in his mind.

What had he _done_?

Alfred shut his eyes again, as if he could possibly go back to sleep for another few hours of blissful oblivion.  The pounding in his head had returned and the echoes of sharp-tongued words reverberated through the blanket cave they had built.

_You were acting? This whole time?_

The urge to run to Edward’s apartment and throw himself on his knees and beg for forgiveness was nearly overpowering, but Mina dreamed on and her face was angelic in the sunlight and relaxed and the last thing Alfred needed to do was disturb her and then disappear. He could sense that Mina was going to hover for the next few weeks.

 _Weeks_. The idea of spending days and weeks and months and years without Edward’s touch and the sound of his voice was the sort of torturous thought that made his stomach churn with sickness.

“Mina,” he whispered, voice cracked with the remnants of all the yelling and unshed tears, “Mina, I need to — I’m going to —."

Somehow, through the haze of sleep, she understood enough to shift out of his way as Alfred tumbled off the couch and scrambled to his feet, stumbling towards the bathroom as the sudden need to vomit seized him.

Mina rose from her blanket haven on the couch a few minutes later to find him retching vainly over the toilet, fingers white around the edge of the bowl.

“Oh, Alfred,” she sighed,  melancholy sympathy oozing through her voice as she crouched beside him, running her hands in comforting circles over his crumpled suit jacket. “Alfred, what happened?”

He sank back onto his heels, hands still tight against the pearly porcelain. “Everything,” he said, the words hollow as they left his lips. Mina hummed affirmatively nonetheless and Alfred fumbled through every phrase he knew in an attempt to describe the multitude of long-simmering feelings that had boiled over on the steps of the supper hall. “I don’t know. Everything.”

“I think I know what you mean,” she said, and Alfred began to protest, for no one could possibly understand the storm thrashing in his mind, but there was something about the undercurrent of resignation in her voice and in the way she curled her fingers between his shoulder blades that made him cut himself short.

“Shit, Mina, I get it now.”

And she held him against her chest again and let the quiet tears trace paths of dark blue down the front of her shirt with patience that Alfred could only hope to have.

 

···

 

Edward didn’t sleep until his clock ticked past four and the sun began to tint the edges of the sky a dusty purple and the inevitable hands of exhaustion dragged him down for a few hours.

It was a dull, dreamless sleep, and his bed felt empty without familiar breaths from the pillow next to his. The ghostly impression of a hand draped across his hip dragged him from merciful silence and back into the unceasing debate raging in his head. Somehow, he was more tired, as if he had sprinted all the way home to Scotland instead of dozed off.

Muscle memory and a craving for any sense of normalcy spurred him to rise from bed somewhat robotically, untangling himself from the sheets and trying to ignore the single text lighting up his phone screen.

He moved through the motions of a Saturday morning with stiffness and obligation, like he was fourteen again and trapped in dance class with his hands on the waist of some pretty girl with glimmering blue eyes, eyes like sapphires set in a luminescent gold, eyes like _his_.

Edward shook himself and focused on pouring exactly enough coffee to line up with the stain ringing his favorite mug.

He sat carefully on the edge of the sofa, as if it was all an illusion, potentially prone to fade away before his eyes. It didn’t seem possible for the world to be so calm, so _normal_ , after the night before. Certainly, London should be in shambles, rocked to the core by the earthquake that had torn Edward in two. Surely it should be nothing but panic, nothing but chaos. Edward was split along his ancient fault lines, and it couldn’t be possible for the city to be as exceedingly ordinary as it was.

A car horn blared in the street below and Edward jumped, splashing droplets of coffee across the arm of his sofa.

He couldn’t seem to care.

But perhaps more torturous than the frustratingly unchanged world outside his flat was the flickering snapshots of memory that darted through the room like ghosts, will-o’-the-wisps luring him into an endless kaleidoscope of happy days and happier nights. Alfred’s silhouette appeared against the windows and his voice drifted lazily down the hall and his footsteps padded across the rug and then Edward blinked and the room was silent and blank again.

God, he needed to sleep.

Edward took a shaky sip of his coffee and let his mind drift. He should call Josephine (except she was asleep) or Florence (who would probably offer some solid advice), but the idea of reliving the fight — which it was, no matter how much he wanted to pass it off as a _disagreement_ or _misunderstanding_ — made his gut roll with unbidden nerves.

He couldn’t believe he had said the things he did. He couldn’t imagine that Alfred had done the things he had. It all felt like a horrible, horrible dream, a figment of his imagination, a cruel trick or a biting backhanded slap from fate, which had finally decided that their happiness was undeserved. It had all been too perfect.

But were they really happy? Or had Edward fallen in love with a mirage, an illusion?

Had he even been in love?

He really did feel like an idiot now, having thought he was truly falling in love after mere days. How had he not noticed his naivete, which Alfred surely had? Alfred must have thought him completely oblivious, which was probably truer than he wanted to admit.

He knew what Florence would say. She’d say _talk to him_ , _figure it out_. She’d say _you want him_ and _he wants you_ and _you can’t let him slip away_.

Another sip of coffee. And another. And another and another and suddenly the cup was empty and the sun had risen up above the buildings completely and left patches of warmth across his living room.

Edward couldn’t quite bring himself to move from his spot of sunlight, even as the hands of the clock flicked past noon and hunger crept through him, the coffee not enough. He felt hollow.

Something had shifted. Something would never be the same.

 

When Edward turned eighteen, his father had taken him out for dinner. _“One last hurrah,”_ he’d called it, a rare genuine smile flitting across his face when he’d pitched the idea on the way back from Edward’s last regatta, which made Edward feel that turning him down was not an option. So he sat primly on a leather upholstered dinner chair at the businessman’s haunt on the other side of town, swallowing hard to keep some unnamed emotion from overflowing and spilling across the fine china and silver before him while his father rambled about how well he’d do in university and how he’d have Florence wearing a glittering ring within a year if they kept up at the rate they were going.

Edward felt sick at the thought.

A life with Florence at his side, her perfect butterscotch curls and wide eyes and quiet nature making her the perfect politician’s wife, was the worst kind of hell he could imagine.

And yet he couldn’t dare to tell his father this. He’d slaved over law books and labored through school to earn even the smallest chance at success. He’d sacrificed evening after evening with his family in order to plug extra hours at the bank to pay for Josephine’s cameras and Edward’s rowing, all to see Edward himself go off and do what he loved.

The one problem was that _who_ Edward loved didn’t quite fit his picture of the perfect future.

Edward would never love Florence, not like that.

Not when that age-old kiss behind the shed played on repeat in his mind. Not when the brilliant smile of the boy in the skull next to him shone in the corners of his vision. Not when the gentle curve of the waiter’s waist caught his eye every time he passed.

Not when he hated the suits and the stiff dancing and the neat rows of perfect houses in perfect little towns.

And still, his father rambled, joking about bedding Florence before the wedding, his eyes never quite seeing past the mask his son wore.

One day he’d leave it all behind, Edward promised himself, crumpling the pressed white tablecloth as the waiter passed again and his father guffawed at some crude quip. One day he’d be himself again.

One day he’d find another Peter.

 

···

 

Harriet pounded on the door around noon, let herself in right after, and plopped a glass dish rather carelessly on the kitchen table, making Alfred wince and Mina dive to keep it from crashing to the floor.

“What _is_ this?” she cried, staggering as she caught it.

Harriet went to join Alfred under Mina’s duvet on the couch, kicking off her heels and curling up against his side with the grace and prowess of a lioness. “It’s my sympathy casserole, in case of disasters.”

“No casserole should weigh this much,” Mina grumbled.

Harriet shrugged, taking in Alfred’s London School of Economics t-shirt (giant and stolen from Edward’s closet) and disheveled hair with ease.

“So it happened last night?”

Alfred scoffed. “That’s one way to put it. I’d say he nearly ripped my throat out but I think he was closer to outright crying so—.” The memory of the barely restrained despair in Edward’s voice made Alfred want to evaporate on the spot, so he cut himself off with a hiccup.

Harriet nodded and pulled the duvet tight against their chests, relishing the warmth and the quiet of the apartment, Mina slipping in on Alfred’s other side shortly and flicking through innumerable terrible game shows until they found the worst of them all.

At least he wasn’t wallowing alone.

 

The rest of the weekend passed in a stupor, clouded with the haze of laziness and blatant sadness.

Alfred felt he was in mourning.

Monday came and Mina had to stand above his bed and coax him forth for fifteen minutes before he crawled from the sheets and stood before his mirror, comb in hand, wondering if work was really worth all the effort.

With some more pushing and prodding, he found himself marching through the front doors of the Buckingham with Mina at his side, looking fairly presentable and feeling as though he’d been struck in the head by a brick.

His laptop, tucked away in its bag, weighed more than it ever had before, for now it was laden with Alfred’s greatest enemy. The only thing that kept him from chucking it and the whole damn article out the window was that it was too late to pitch a new idea and write anything good enough to convince the Duchess to let him branch out.

But, God, did he long to.

They strode through the lobby just as they had planned, but Edward was nowhere in sight. Part of him breathed a sigh of relief, for he wanted a plan before the inevitable second confrontation occurred, and the other half cried out in distress and confusion.

Oh, how he missed him already.

Alfred ached to see his eyes and feel his lips and hold his hands and hear his voice and laugh at his stupid puns and watch him stumble to the kitchen in the morning in search of coffee and take him out dancing sometime and drag him out to Plas Newydd to meet the Paget hoard and a million other things, things he didn’t dare imagine for fear of only increasing his anguish.

He made his way numbly to his desk, sitting and pulling up his inbox to shuffle through the memos and dumb videos Ernst sent him when he got bored.

The quiet morning bustle of the office was calming at least — Nancy and Charles flirting again, Harriet leading a small pack of interns to the break room, Albert trying to fix Victoria’s stapler with a ballpoint pen… the normalcy of it all kicked Alfred out of his Edward-related haze and into robotic productivity, at least temporarily.

He sorted through the memos and tapped out automatic replies, chatted aimlessly with Victoria for a bit, forced a smile when the Duchess stalked by on her Monday inspection. Charles had made some delicious cream-filled pastry and Alfred had to restrain himself from eating ten, Brodie the intern sheepishly asked him to help him make the coffee maker work. He busied himself with cracking jokes with the interns at lunch and bothering Ernst about his most recent adventure with Harriet.

Anything to keep his mind away from _him_ , really.

Anything to stay afloat.

Mina caught him by the arm after lunch break with the interns.

“Victoria says she wants final drafts in by the end of the day.”

“I know; I saw the email. Also, did you know that Ernst is writing his piece on _chemsex_? I didn’t think the Duchess would have entertained the idea for even a second—.”

With a sigh, Mina pulled him into Victoria’s empty office for a moment. “You’re avoiding the point here.”

Alfred’s eyes flicked over the map of the world and the photos of Albert in front of various landmarks in Paris and the innumerable snapshots of Dash, trying to keep from meeting Mina’s eyes.

“You have to publish it.”

Alfred groaned. “I _know_.”

“No time to rewrite it.”

“Yeah, I don’t even want to think about switching my topic so late in the game, and I _really_ want the Duchess to let me do some political writing and this is my only chance—.”

“But,” Mina interrupted, “you could end it differently.”

 

···

 

_Love isn’t the easiest thing to find nowadays. Maybe it’s the touch-and-go nature of modern culture or the general overload of other, more pressing responsibilities and stressors on the younger generations, but something’s making it difficult to catch and hold onto real, undeniable connections._

_I was unlucky enough to find one in the midst of my quest for a unique article. I stumbled across a man who I wanted to keep close for eternity. I found a guy with a brilliant smile and even more brilliant mind, a guy whose laugh could be an entire operatic movement, a guy whose eyes rival the stars._

_And then I had to lose him._

_And then I did._

_And it wasn’t because of these little things I’ve listed out. They’re mostly harmless and I hardly carried them out anyway. He never commented on a single one. I started to panic because none of the things I was doing, as weak as they were, were eliciting a reaction. He wasn’t dumping me. So, I came up with the grand plan of faking it all and fabricating some intense and elaborate plot, but that’s all been deleted now. Everything above are things that I did, but not quite._

_I started to realize that the things I was doing for the sake of this article weren’t for the article at all. I meant them. I wanted to be with him constantly, to hear his voice and listen to his stories. I wanted to know him inside and out, I wanted to tell him I loved him._

_But no matter how genuine I was, it was all built on a pretense._

_I lost him because I lied, and it wasn’t as if we were both innocent, but I did lie and he has every right to be upset._

_To Edward, given the unlikely event that you’re reading this: I’m sorry._

_And to the rest of you, in case you’ve stuck around through this rollercoaster: the eighth and final way to lose a guy is to lie._

_Now that I’ve imparted the great secret to romance, you may do with it what you will._

_(Also Edward call me)_

···

 

“You should probably take out that last bit,” Mina suggested.

 

···

 

_~~(Also Edward call me)~~ _ ~~~~

···

 

Florence insisted they go out for lunch.

“You need some air,” she had said as soon as Edward stopped by her desk in the morning. “You look dead on your feet.”

“I _am_ dead on my feet,” he had sighed.

The rest of the morning passed in a blur. Peel smiled knowingly every time Edward popped into his office to drop off papers or fresh cups of coffee, but the idea of taking the job with Melbourne almost made Edward sick.

Noon rolled around after what felt like an eternity. Florence wouldn’t let him skirt around the back of the building to avoid passing the Buckingham offices and she had to keep him from bolting in the opposite direction at the mere sight of blond hair on the other side of the doors (it wasn’t even Alfred). By the time they settled on a bench with gyoza from a street vendor, Edward was exhausted all over again.

“Edward, you didn’t even talk to him. Hell, you didn’t even _see_ him,” Florence said around a mouthful of pork.

He prodded at a dumpling aimlessly, appetite still evading him. “I don’t know what’s happening in my brain anymore.”

“I can’t really help you there,” she sighed. Pedestrians and taxis and the occasional bus meandered by them, a few groups of students poured over journals and textbooks on the grassy knoll behind them, only interrupted by the occasional dog bark or car horn. The city was quiet and yet undeniably alive, and for the first time in a long while, its unceasing indifference to Edward’s suffering made him sad. Usually, the persistence of the lives of his neighbors and the strangers who shared the streets with him was reassuring, but lately, everything that Edward had once found comforting had been making him crawl with longing.

There was no comfort but Alfred.

“You’re thinking about him again,” Florence stated matter-of-factly.

Edward sighed. “I think I always will be unless I talk to him.”

“Well, at least you’re self-aware.”

He cracked a small grin at that and Florence watched him with thinly veiled amusement until the sheer absurdity of the past few weeks washed over him and he couldn’t help but laugh.

And so they did, until their sides ached and Florence was wiping tears from under her eyes.

 

The email from Melbourne came that evening, and Edward only had to read the subject to know he had gotten the job.

He worried his bottom lip until the tang of blood sprung across his tongue.

 

Alfred hadn’t texted anything after the first apology, and Edward had yet to reply.

Another day came and went without a peep from him. And then another. And another. Before Edward could even realize it, a week had passed and he stood in front of his new office building a few streets over with a cardboard box filled with his things. He officially started on Monday, but Peel had insisted he move into the new space beforehand. Florence had made him promise they’d meet for lunch as often as possible, but Edward had a distinct feeling that everything was about to change.

A newsstand along the curb hawked the day’s paper and a rack of magazines, and the familiar sophisticated print of the Buckingham caught his eye. Edward chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment before giving in and handing the cashier a few pounds and shoving the magazine along the side of his box.

He nearly forgot about it, distracted by the maze-like structure of the new building and the measured stares of his new coworkers, who were clearly sizing him up. Melbourne came over to shake his hand and direct his questions to the frankly terrifying receptionist, who was built like a lumberjack and had the personality to match. Of _course_ the burly receptionist would notice the frivolous high-society magazine crumpled at the bottom of the box.

After earning a lifetime’s worth of funny looks from the guy, Edward figured he should get it over with and immediately toss the damn thing out (and avoid all further interactions with any of the others in the office).

He sat carefully at his new desk and flipped through the pages of restaurant reviews and fashion ads and interviews until he found what he was looking for: Alfred’s name and a small headshot alongside it, printed neatly beneath the headline. The rage of the night at the gala flared within him again. It had been stamped out temporarily by the sheer loneliness of the weekend, but seeing the stupid title of the stupid article make anger boil in his gut.

How could Alfred _do_ this?

Edward managed to still his shaking hands long enough to read the opening paragraph and skim the various sections. He jolted at each header. _That_ explained why Alfred had shown up at the office, his awkward texting, the spontaneous theatre date, the guitar incident.

That explained why Alfred had said he was falling in love with him.

That explained why Alfred had stuck around. Why he had cared so much, why he had listened to Edward spill his heart out.

Edward sat numbly, magazine clutched too tightly in his hands. It really had all been fake, hadn’t it?

He had to keep going, though. He had to know it all.

The last few paragraphs glazed into nothingness in his mind, until the conclusion rolled around and Edward figured he should pay attention, just in case.

The voice in the back of his mind questioned what he was hoping for, but there wasn’t an answer.

Not until the words Alfred had written began to register.

Edward’s hands were shaking again, but for a different reason altogether.

 

···

 

 **Edward:** Hey can we talk?

 **Edward:** I read your article

 

···

 

Saturday morning brought a rainstorm that whipped the trees and scattered brightly colored leaves across the streets. Alfred gulped as he examined himself in the mirror, running a hand through his hair for the dozenth time and pulling anxiously at the collar of his shirt.

Ten minutes until he was meeting Edward at the café across the street.

He’d practically cried at the texts (Mina nearly had, too), and now that his chance had finally come, it didn’t quite seem real. Maybe it was all a wishful figment of his imagination, maybe he was trapped in a dream.

Alfred pinched himself just to check, and judging by the very tangible pain that shot up through his wrist at the motion, he was awake.

He didn’t have a game plan, no script prepared. He hadn’t even played the meeting out in his mind, for there was no way to predict what Edward was going to say. Besides, honesty was his best option, considering the whole basis of their argument had been the lie.

Mina knocked gently on the bathroom door. “Seven minutes.”

Alfred took a steadying breath and nodded at himself in the mirror like he used to before going on stage in uni. _You got this_.

“You got this,” Mina chanted as he opened the bathroom door, pumping her fist a little as Alfred marched down the hall.

The urgency of the situation descended upon him as he shut the door of the flat behind him, and he scampered down the stairs two at a time. He darted across the street, weaving between cars with frenzy before he stumbled through the door of the café and directly into Edward, who stood at the back of the line.

“Oh,” Alfred said eloquently.

Edward turned, startled, and something about the relief in his eyes set Alfred’s pounding heart at ease.

Before he could shut his mouth and keep from saying something completely stupid, he let out a sigh. “I fucking _missed_ you.”

“I missed you, too,” Edward said, which was very much not what Alfred was expecting, and he had to force his eyes to keep from straying to Edward’s lips. He was biting them again, as he tended to do when nervous.

Alfred swallowed. “You read the article?”

“I did.” Edward shifted slightly, moving them up in line and burrowing his hands deeper into his pockets. “You’re an excellent writer,” he said, somewhat aimlessly.

“I’m really not,” Alfred laughed. “I just got inspired.”

Edward smiled (and Alfred nearly collapsed). “No, you’re brilliant.”

They were quiet for a moment, the air heavy with words unsaid. They inched closer towards the counter, and Alfred longed for nothing more than to slip beneath Edward’s arm and take in his warmth and his cinnamon scent and the sharp line of his jaw and the gleam of his smile when Alfred said something particularly witty or dumb.

Edward ordered them their regulars and deftly blocked Alfred from slipping his own card up to the register. The shop was relatively quiet, and they found a table easily. Alfred’s knee bounced incessantly under the table and Edward studied the grain of the wood, his curls tumbling over his forehead and masking his eyes.

Alfred couldn’t take it anymore. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Edward jerked his head up, eyes wide. “No, _I’m_ sorry.”

“What?”

“I completely overreacted. I didn’t listen to you. Running away was a mistake, and if anything, you should have run away from me, because I did write an essay on us, which was shitty—."

Alfred gaped. “I lied to you! I tried to be horrible to you!”

“Yes, but you _weren’t_.” Edward leaned forward across the table, the earnest look in his eyes stirring a protective urge in Alfred’s chest. “You weren’t horrible. I didn’t notice. I just got worried that everything you said, everything you did, was fake. But now I know that they weren’t, and really we were both being very dumb about this, and I think that we should maybe stop being mad at each other and go back to doing whatever we were doing because it was really nice and I am definitely not using you as a replacement for anything because you are unique and wonderful and I’ve never felt like this before and—.”

Alfred lunged up to catch Edward’s lips in a kiss, quick and chaste, but perhaps stronger than any other kiss they had shared. The frantic passion of their first night, the steady rhythm of their time on the balcony… it all paled in comparison to the pure relief that seeped through Alfred at the touch of Edward’s lips.

He pulled back, ever so slightly, just enough to catch Edward’s expression. It was an unreadable one that spoke of joy and satisfaction and finality and security, and Alfred half wanted to pull him close again and tangle his fingers in those curls and reacquaint himself with every inch of Edward’s body, but the waitress came to give them their drinks and he was forced to sink back down into his chair.

Edward coughed ever so slightly. “So…?”

Alfred took a shaky sip of his coffee. “So.”

“Are we good to try again?”

_“Definitely.”_

 

···

 

The first snowfall of the year had descended upon London, blanketing the rooftops in glimmering white. Edward, who hated the cold, found himself wrapped in a sweltering cardigan, even with the thermostat bumped up as far as his budget would allow.

They’d planned to go out to dinner, but something about the silent flurries made Edward want nothing but to curl up under a pile of blankets and trade lazy kisses late into the night. Alfred had readily agreed to the change of plans.

He should knock any minute now, even though he could easily let himself in (and he’d have to, because Edward was _not_ planning on moving from his blanket mountain anytime soon), and yet there was no bubbling anticipation in his chest, not like before.

Alfred was no longer fleeting. They were steady and familiar. They talked and they laughed and they cried and they held each other and got tangled in bed together. It wasn’t the perpetual chess game that Florence had been. There was no strategy, no play-by-play. There was nothing but the two of them and the strings between them.

Edward smiled giddily at the thought that Alfred was his and he was Alfred’s, and that it would stay that way for as long as he wanted it to.

 

···

 

_From: mbuccleuch@buckinghampress.org_

_To: apaget@buckinghampress.org_

_Mr. Paget –_

_Your article was a most interesting read. Though the ending was unprofessional and entirely off topic, it was somewhat touching, and Miss Hanover says that we have received dozens of emails in reaction to your piece._

_Therefore, I think it would be uncouth for me to restrict you from extending your column into a more socially relevant realm._

_Also, good luck with Edmund or whatever his name is._

_– Matilda Buccleuch_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow i actually finished this which is impressive, considering my track record. 
> 
> thank you dearly for reading this mess! i'll probably throw on some random oneshots (and definitely some flomina because i want to).


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